But the winners don't only write the history books ( or the definition of terrorist), they determine who does and who does not account for their actions as a nation. For example: Saddam Hussein, contrary to global view, UN votes, and military definitions of self defense, invades Kuwait, citing what it considered legitimate cause ( slant drilling among others) which proved insufficient to most of the rest of the world. Result: Massive invasion, enforced surrender and accountability. George W. Bush, contrary to global view, UN votes and military definitions of self defense, invades Iraq, citing what it considered legitimate cause ( WMD, 9-11, etc.) which proved insufficient to most of the rest of the world. Result: You tell me. Superpowers are not accountable...Who holds them to account. We have been cited by the world court, the UN, the Red Cross, etc. And we shrug it off. Another example...following WWII, a mass grave was found in Poland. The entire Polish military hierarchy had been summarily excecuted, and dropped in a hole. The Soviets said the Germans did it....the Germans said the Soviets did it. Result: At the time, and for the subsequent 40 years, the atrocity was chalked up to the Germans. They had lost, they were the ones being held accountable for their crimes. People were even tried and excecuted as a result. Problem...40 years later, after the fall of the USSR, evidence proves it wasn't the Germans, it was the Soviets. Who was held accountable? To date, the only recorded repercussions of the action were those visited on the Germans deemed responsible. Moral of the story? It is easy to say that nations are accountable when you are the nation no one can hold accountable for anything...not Nagasaki, not Wounded Knee...nothing. The only price you pay is that which you decide to pay, nothing more. So for people without a nation, like the Palestinians were for a long time, the only recourse was, by definition, illegal...or 'terrorist'. The definition is written by those in power as a means of ensuring that they remain there; sort of a post applied Metternech philosophy of international affairs. Take the IRA. Originally they tried to fight back with conventional means...only potatoe farmers and poets with pitchforks and rifles stood little chance against the most powerful military in the world, at the time, and they were crushed. Like the PLO, the only way they ever got anything was through 'terrorism', and it is the only way they could have, short of another Gandhi.
I see exactly what you're saying, and you make excellent points. But I keep going back to the idea that a rose by any other name is still a rose. To the families of dead civilians, whether their relatives were killed by American missiles or Palestinian suicide bombers, the results are still the same. Their grief won't be lessened by the fact that the death was "collateral." Their lives are permanently marred by senseless violence and, let's be honest, terror. "Terrorism" and "war" are terms we used to justify (or condemn) violence, and it's completely arbitrary and dependent on one's perspective, ideological leanings and proximity to the event. I'm not saying the United States is a terrorist nation or that al Queda is on equal footing with Israel (just an example), but to deny that there's no gray area misrepresents the issue. Like I said, you make several *excellent* points that are well-reasoned. I just drew a different conclusion.
If I understand you correctly, you are saying that (according to your view) that a group is a "terrorist" only if that group has no affiliation to a national or pseudo-national authority. And only a "terrorist" can comit "terrorist acts" while the same acts commit by a national authority is not "a terrorist act". If I understand you correctly, then I necessarily reach the following conclusion: Hamas suicide bombers are "terrorist" and bombings "terrorist acts". But if the Palestinian Authority itself carried out the same acts, it could not be considered "terrorist" and the actions would not be considered "terrorist acts". If the IRA were supported by the Irish govt, those same acts would no longer be terrorist acts and the IRA/Irish govt, being a "nation answerable to the world stage" could not be considered "terrorist", etc etc Is this what you mean to say?
I hope you didn't take my post as unquestioned support for military action by 'legitimate' armies. I was quibbling with the blurring of the terrorist/military action line. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was not terrorist. Neither was the US attack on Iraq. In both cases a country waged war on another country. A war for which the leadership was responsible and accountable. (whether others could do anything about it, is another matter). I find this very distinct from Osma's boys attacks on the US, or IRA bombings of Irish pubs -- regardless of what their perceptions might be. There were several posts suggesting the bombs on Japan were 'terrorist' by definition. Again. I disagree. Heinous, maybe, but not terrorist. I don't think I'm being jingoistic here (had to sneak that word to a MacBeth response ). Just quibbling with the broad bush with which the 'terrorist' label was being applied. I wasn't addressing your misgivings about the Iraq war. But I think you may have addressed those once or twice already.
I said much more than that. If the Palestinian Authority was at war with Israel and bombed Israeli targets, then those actions would be less likely to be considered terrorist. Israel could strike back at Palestine, or surrender. War IS hell. If the republic of Ireland declared war on Great Britain and bombed British cities, again, it would be less terrorist than the old IRA way of doing business. As I mentioned in my original post, revolutions tend to be a little less clear. The stronger examples being discussed in this thread were US bombs on Japan, and OBL's involvement in WTC attacks. Very different in that OBL did not intend to invade the US -- merely attack and run. Quite different from the Iraq attack on Kuwait, or any other war between nations. In fact, as he was not trying to topple a government, or form a nation his attack could not even be considered a revolution. Do you see no difference between the US dropping a bomb on Japan during a war, and OBL flying planes into a building during a time of peace?
I'm not going to deny that it did play a role. How much it played a role on both sides will be forever debated. Blood on Our Hands? Nicholas D. Kristof New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Tuesday, August 5, 2003 Posted: 6:54 AM EDT (1054 GMT) Tomorrow will mark the anniversary of one of the most morally contentious events of the 20th century, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. And after 58 years, there's an emerging consensus: we Americans have blood on our hands. There has been a chorus here and abroad that the U.S. has little moral standing on the issue of weapons of mass destruction because we were the first to use the atomic bomb. As Nelson Mandela said of Americans in a speech on Jan. 31, "Because they decided to kill innocent people in Japan, who are still suffering from that, who are they now to pretend that they are the policeman of the world?" The traditional American position, that our intention in dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki was to end the war early and save lives, has been poked full of holes. Revisionist historians like Gar Alperovitz argue persuasively that Washington believed the bombing militarily unnecessary (except to establish American primacy in the postwar order) because, as the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey put it in 1946, "in all probability" Japan would have surrendered even without the atomic bombs. Yet this emerging consensus is, I think, profoundly mistaken. While American scholarship has undercut the U.S. moral position, Japanese historical research has bolstered it. The Japanese scholarship, by historians like Sadao Asada of Doshisha University in Kyoto, notes that Japanese wartime leaders who favored surrender saw their salvation in the atomic bombing. The Japanese military was steadfastly refusing to give up, so the peace faction seized upon the bombing as a new argument to force surrender. "We of the peace party were assisted by the atomic bomb in our endeavor to end the war," Koichi Kido, one of Emperor Hirohito's closest aides, said later. Wartime records and memoirs show that the emperor and some of his aides wanted to end the war by summer 1945. But they were vacillating and couldn't prevail over a military that was determined to keep going even if that meant, as a navy official urged at one meeting, "sacrificing 20 million Japanese lives." The atomic bombings broke this political stalemate and were thus described by Mitsumasa Yonai, the navy minister at the time, as a "gift from heaven." Without the atomic bombings, Japan would have continued fighting by inertia. This would have meant more firebombing of Japanese cities and a ground invasion, planned for November 1945, of the main Japanese islands. The fighting over the small, sparsely populated islands of Okinawa had killed 14,000 Americans and 200,000 Japanese, and in the main islands the toll would have run into the millions. "The atomic bomb was a golden opportunity given by heaven for Japan to end the war," Hisatsune Sakomizu, the chief cabinet secretary in 1945, said later. Some argue that the U.S. could have demonstrated the bomb on an uninhabited island, or could have encouraged surrender by promising that Japan could keep its emperor. Yes, perhaps, and we should have tried. We could also have waited longer before dropping the second bomb, on Nagasaki. But, sadly, the record suggests that restraint would not have worked. The Japanese military ferociously resisted surrender even after two atomic bombings on major cities, even after Soviet entry into the war, even when it expected another atomic bomb — on Tokyo. One of the great tales of World War II concerns an American fighter pilot named Marcus McDilda who was shot down on Aug. 8 and brutally interrogated about the atomic bombs. He knew nothing, but under torture he "confessed" that the U.S. had 100 more nuclear weapons and planned to destroy Tokyo "in the next few days." The war minister informed the cabinet of this grim news — but still adamantly opposed surrender. In the aftermath of the atomic bombing, the emperor and peace faction finally insisted on surrender and were able to prevail. It feels unseemly to defend the vaporizing of two cities, events that are regarded in some quarters as among the most monstrous acts of the 20th century. But we owe it to history to appreciate that the greatest tragedy of Hiroshima was not that so many people were incinerated in an instant, but that in a complex and brutal world, the alternatives were worse. Nicholas D. Kristof is an op-ed columnist with The New York Times http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/08/05/nyt.kristof/index.html
I see the problem. You refuse to believe that there is "good" or "bad." If a terrorist chops of a Jew's head and shows it on tv to instill fear in Americans, vs. America showing Saddam's dead sons to show the Iraqi people they are safe, and you REFUSE to make a judgment that one is good and one is bad, then we have a serious problem. What is this stuff about "agreeing with myself." What a joke. I make my own decisions based on reasoning. I am capable of saying US slavery is bad and US democracy and freedom is good. Your inability to do so is kind of shocking. And you are confusing subjectivity with morality. I am objectively choosing one moral path over another. That is not subjectivity. It is too bad you refuse to make moral judgments, that is a huge flaw in your thinking. LOL, I didn't know I was supposed to lay out my argument as to why democracy is good. That is way out of the scope of this discussion. I guarantee you everyone else on this board besides a few people from China would agree that democracy is good. And sure, it's a matter of opinion. So what? I can have the opinion that the Nazis were right. Like I said, ALL countries are egocentric. You don't think Islamist countries believe they are following the TRUE religion and the the west is evil? You don't think that the majority of Europeans believe they are more enlightened than Americans? You don't think many Chinese feel they will be an empire soon? You don't think Japan considers itself side by side with th US at the top of the economic mountain? I could go on. The sentiment is universal. I will also point out that I trust the American people to make the right choices more than I do other populaces. The American people 1) support a painful war on terror before terrorism gets worse 2) support rebuilding countries who are ravaged 3) want to keep their civil rights 4) undertand the importance of tolerating Muslims and their religion 5) are not becoming protectionist. And your assertion that it is bad to be ego-centric is your opinion, and you are really only agreeing with yourself.
but wait...i willingly acknowledge that america isn't perfect...that america makes mistakes. my point is there is a difference between targetting civilians and not targetting civilians. we can talk about perspective all day long...but that's just talk. seeking to blow up school buses of elementary age children is dramatically different from seeking to blow up factories/industrial cities/military installations, etc. it just is. i'm sure that seems simplistic to you...but i honestly don't think there's even any question about it. i don't believe that everything is up for interpretation...i do believe there are some objective rights and wrongs in the world. i'm completely willing to recognize that my perception is colored by my culture and socialization...but ultimately, targetting kids on school buses is evil. i just keep coming back there. and maybe dropping bombs that cause collateral damage in the form of civilian casualties is evil too..it's certainly the product of a sinful, evil world, i'll grant you. but i still mark a distinction between the two. you can label that convenient all you want...but that's at least mildly insulting.
