Why terrorists will ultimately fail...
POSTED BY: chrisisall
UPDATED: Wednesday, August 26, 2026 00:13
VIEWED: 9344
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They "worked" by killing thousands of Iraqi civilians. This is the "blood on our hands" that folk like Dreamtrove like to add in to our total headcount.
I'm puzzled as to what you are saying here. You throw around various figures for loss of life from the war and tish tish that that is appauling and our fault and yet the alternative to the war, the thing you say was working killed many more than that in a single year?
So what is it?
My feeling, coming out of left field so to speak is that your opposition to the war has nothing to do with concern for the Iraqis, you are feeling guilt by association for what you see as a failed policy. Had Rumsfeld been right (how ever unlikely that seems) and we were now on our second year of reconstruction I think you'd be rar raring with the best of them. The only consistant part to your many arguments is the assertion that somehow there HAD to have been a bloodless alternative that absolves us from all responsability. There wasn't, in fact there was "blood on our hands" almost every year since 1991 you just never looked for it until now. No matter what we did it was never going to be clean. Our only real hope was that we could make it final.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Geezer:Quote:
Originally posted by Fletch2:
Except the French Resistance --- surely the most recognisable "Freedom Fighters" punished and killed collaborators even after hostilities were ended. The number of people they executed runs into 1000's and they all represent a civillian population.
Collaborators may have been civilians, but hardly innocent bystanders. They provided aid, comfort, and information to the enemy, which is usually considered treason. Not that I sanction illegal punishment or executions, but they certainly had crimes to pay for, though it should have been before a court.
"Keep the Shiny side up"
Oh indeed, but then the French had surrendered and as such technically were no longer at war with Germany. And while I would be the first to condem people like the Frenchmen that helped the SS round up French Jews, does rightious retribution extend as far as girls that date German soldiers, or to businessmen often compelled to work with the Germans?
The problem I have is that were I an Iraqi Baathist I could make an equally compelling case that killing people working for the Americans was equally justified.
That's the problem with this question, that's why I don't know that you can nescessarily create a psudo legalistic definition that you can make stick. If we accept that what the French Resistance did was right and proper in WW2, there will be groups in Iraq who have done nothing worse than that. If we write a definition that makes the French case OK then we write one that makes some of the Iraqi insurgency ok, I cant see a way around it.
Personally I'm far more comfortable viewing this as an eye of the beholder issue, there are two sides to every story and each side has to see themselves as the heroes. I personally take sides but understand that I'm motivated in part by national and cultural norms to see my side as the only "good" guys.
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Quote:Well, I'm motivated by the quest for truth, which may or may not have me seeing my side as even very good, let alone heroes.
Originally posted by Fletch2:
Personally I'm far more comfortable viewing this as an eye of the beholder issue, there are two sides to every story and each side has to see themselves as the heroes. I personally take sides but understand that I'm motivated in part by national and cultural norms to see my side as the only "good" guys.
It's more like the pawns (both civilian and military) are the innocents, and the Kings and Queens are the cold, calculating 'bad' guys.
Evil pawn Chrisisall
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Quote:
Originally posted by Fletch2:
Personally I'm far more comfortable viewing this as an eye of the beholder issue, there are two sides to every story and each side has to see themselves as the heroes. I personally take sides but understand that I'm motivated in part by national and cultural norms to see my side as the only "good" guys.
Sooo, as I said earlier, a Terrorist is someone who attacks us...
More insane ramblings by the people who brought you beeeer milkshakes!
And as you know, these are open forums, you're able to come and listen to what I have to say.
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Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:Quote:
Originally posted by Fletch2:
Personally I'm far more comfortable viewing this as an eye of the beholder issue, there are two sides to every story and each side has to see themselves as the heroes. I personally take sides but understand that I'm motivated in part by national and cultural norms to see my side as the only "good" guys.
Sooo, as I said earlier, a Terrorist is someone who attacks us...
Indeed.
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Fletch- I did some quick internet research on the effect of sanctions on child mortality. It seems that the widely quoted figures (0.5-1.5 million) were wildly erroneous.
Quote:www.thenation.com/doc/20011203/cortright who tells you more children will perish in Iraq this month than Americans died on September 11 is cutting and pasting inflated mid-1990s statistics onto a country that has changed significantly since then. Knowingly or not, these critics are mangling the facts to prove a debatable point
In October 1997 the authors of the initial letter wrote again to The Lancet, this time reporting that mortality rates in the follow-up study were "several-fold lower than the estimate for 1995--for unknown reasons." While the initial report of more than 567,000 deaths attracted major news coverage, the subsequent disavowal of those numbers passed unnoticed in the press. The two most reliable scientific studies on sanctions in Iraq are the 1999 report "Morbidity and Mortality Among Iraqi Children," by Columbia University's Richard Garfield, and "Sanctions and Childhood Mortality in Iraq," a May 2000 article by Mohamed Ali and Iqbal Shah in The Lancet. Garfield, an expert on the public-health impact of sanctions, conducted a comparative analysis of the more than two dozen major studies that have analyzed malnutrition and mortality figures in Iraq during the past decade. He estimated the most likely number of excess deaths among children under five years of age from 1990 through March 1998 to be 227,000.
www.reason.com/0203/fe.mw.the.shtml
The actual average was more like 27,000 per year, but this was declining steeply as sanctions were progressively lifted to become more like an arms enbargo. Estimated post-invasion deaths (from similar cause such as malnutrition, disease, crime, and- of course- warfare) are at about that level. (I can go into detail on that if you want.) So level-of-harm-wise it's likely that 'smart sanctions' as the UN proposed would probably have cost fewer lives than outright invasion.
IF the invasion had been successful (toppling Saddam with few civilian lives lost) I probably would be saying 'job well done'. Doesn't meet the definition of terrorism because the civilian population would be benefitted, not harmed. But I knew even BEFORE the invasion that it wasn't going to work and the way the administraiotn f*cked it up guaranteed the results would be more gruesome than necessary.
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Free as in freedom, not beer.
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Interesting, be sure to lob those figures at DT should he pop up again.
I'm not trying to whitewash this, I fully understand that the situation there is dangerous and perilous all I'm saying is that there was almost nothing that could be done (or not done) that would not have resulted in more Iraqi dead. We know the numbers for the course of action we decided on and we know the numbers for doing nothing (assuming sanctions held) we have no idea what it might have been had sanctions failed without adiquate safeguards, if covert action had created a power vacuum or any of the other scenarios. We can hope that the numbers would be better but that's a road not taken and to be honest the road we are on looked ok if you made certain assumptions.
Assuming that there was a shiny happy option where everyone is ok and we head home at warp speed only happens in Star Trek. Real life is messy. Ask Malcolm Reynolds.
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You and I look at options... perhaps if we tried... there might be a better outcome if...
Bush & Co? NAAAHHH. Bush and the PNAC have wanted to invade Iraq since the previous Gulf War! All they were doing was looking for an excuse, their "Pearl Harbor", to go ahead with the invasion... even if they had to cook up the intelligence (aluminum "centrifuge" tubes, yellow cake) and make phony connections (Iraq= 9-11) in order to do so. Which they did.
The war in Iraq WAS optional. Iraq had no WMD, they were about th be certified by the UN, contracts in Euros were going to be signed with Russia and France. There was no talk of ending the "no fly" zone protection. Death rates were going down and likely to go down further. But Bush had to rush in before Blix could come out with that all-important report. Don't you rmember the "rush to war"? I certainly do!
The rationalization for war drifted around like a fog. It was WMD. No, it was 9-11. It was to stop genocide in Iraq. It was to bring democracy. One thing I know as parent- when you hear multiple excuses you KNOW you're hearing a lie! (The dog ate it. Beside, the computer stopped working. It wasn't really homework anyway.)
So Bush prosecuted an unecessary war that killed tens of thousands of civilians directly- possibly a hundred thousand indirectly- and he didn't even have the excuse "They started it first". "Shock and awe"- what would you call that? Terrorism, as far as I can tell.
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Free as in freedom, not beer.
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Quote:Huh. Usually it's the antiwar faction that's accused of moral relativism. I'm NOT comfortable with "eye of the beholder" interpretations.
Personally I'm far more comfortable viewing this as an eye of the beholder issue, there are two sides to every story and each side has to see themselves as the heroes. I personally take sides but understand that I'm motivated in part by national and cultural norms to see my side as the only "good" guys.
So, to get back to that definition of terrorism.
Quote:I like the fact that the definition currently makes no distinction on the basis of means or funding. Just because Stalin had the entire secret police at his disposal didn't make his actions less terrifying to many Russians. In my opinion, state-sponsored terrorism is still terrorism. I also like that the definition includes torture as well as death. I like the exclusion of the whole "assisting" part. Too much of a slippery slope. I have two issues with the defintion:
Terrorist - A person who uses violence, terror, and intimidation, primarily against non-combatants, to achieve an end.
1) I'm not comfortable playing a numbers game with words like "primarily" or "almost exclusively". Do we look at the victims and parse out how many were combatants, how many were civilians and then if more than half were civilians do we then call it terrorism? What if 46% were civilians? (In Iraq, 46% of the dead were children under 15.)
2) "For an end" While I was ready to exclude self-defense or defense of others, now that I think about it maybe there isn't ANY legitimate reason to target civilians. Excluding self-defense or the defense of others from the list of "permissible" reasons to target civilians would place Sherman's March to the Sea, and the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Israel's Palestinian policy into the category of "terrorism". Perhaps that's where they legitimately belong.
So, if the definition becomes Terrorist - A person who uses or orders violence, terror, and intimidation against non-combatants is that overly broad? It would include ObL, Stalin, Saddam, Sharon, Kennedy, Milosevic, Lincoln, Hilter etc. as well as the soldiers, secret police etc who carried it out. Or do we give a "pass" the leaders who didn't use terrorism as their primary MO, but include the soldiers whose unfortunate duty was to drop "the bombs"?
Also- one more question: Where do we place entities that cause massive death without causing massive fear? It's not terrorism because it doesn't cause fear, but it IS death-dealing.
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Free as in freedom, not beer.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
So, to get back to that definition of terrorism.Quote:I like the fact that the definition currently makes no distinction on the basis of means or funding. Just because Stalin had the entire secret police at his disposal didn't make his actions less terrifying to many Russians. In my opinion, state-sponsored terrorism is still terrorism. I also like that the definition includes torture as well as death. I like the exclusion of the whole "assisting" part. Too much of a slippery slope.
Terrorist - A person who uses violence, terror, and intimidation, primarily against non-combatants, to achieve an end.
I pretty much agree. A terrorist state is just a terrorist organization writ large.
Quote:
have two issues with the defintion:
1) I'm not comfortable playing a numbers game with words like "primarily" or "almost exclusively". Do we look at the victims and parse out how many were combatants, how many were civilians and then if more than half were civilians do we then call it terrorism? What if 46% were civilians? (In Iraq, 46% of the dead were children under 15.)
I think that what seperates terrorism from military action is that intimidation by terror is the terrorist's primary goal. He has little interest in engaging in combat with military forces, unless cornered, and prefers to hit civilian targets, usually those with as much shock and horror value as possible: mosques, schools, markets. The terrorist also prefers to use the most brutal methods possible:nail bombs, beheadings, mutilations.
So, I think leaving "primarily" in is justified.
Quote:
2) "For an end" While I was ready to exclude self-defense or defense of others, now that I think about it maybe there isn't ANY legitimate reason to target civilians. Excluding self-defense or the defense of others from the list of "permissible" reasons to target civilians would place Sherman's March to the Sea, and the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Israel's Palestinian policy into the category of "terrorism". Perhaps that's where they legitimately belong.
I think there's actually two points here. The first is "Is terrorism ever justified?" I'm still trying to come to grips with this one.
The second point - are military campaigns that target civilians as well as military targets terrorism? - goes back to the inclusion of "Primarily" in the definition as discussed above. The terrorist avoids military action if at all posible, and prefers to attack non-combatants. Maybe we should move the "primary", like this.
Terrorist - A person who uses violence, terror, and intimidation against non-combatants as their primary means to achieve an end.
Quote:
So, if the definition becomes Terrorist - A person who uses or orders violence, terror, and intimidation against non-combatants is that overly broad? It would include ObL, Stalin, Saddam, Sharon, Kennedy, Milosevic, Lincoln, Hilter etc. as well as the soldiers, secret police etc who carried it out. Or do we give a "pass" the leaders who didn't use terrorism as their primary MO, but include the soldiers whose unfortunate duty was to drop "the bombs"?
As covered above, I think it is overly broad. I think it's important to strictly define terrorist as one who's main method of achieving their goal is commiting horrific acts against the civilian population. So, for example, Stalin's fight against Germany, although it included many barbaric acts against the German population isn't terrorism, but his repression of ethnic minorities within the Soviet Union was.
Quote:
Also- one more question: Where do we place entities that cause massive death without causing massive fear? It's not terrorism because it doesn't cause fear, but it IS death-dealing.
I'll have to think about this some.
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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