Sure it did, under “Also, is this a relevant question to ask?” How else can one respond to that?
Since all the civilian deaths in Afghanistan are a direct result of 9/11, they all rest firmly on the shoulders of Osama & Co.
I would also argue that since the war in Iraq is also a response to 9/11, connection or not, the fault is also on Osama.
Are you intentionally trying to be obtuse, ironic or are you a legitimate ignoramus? I ask not to insult, but such a statement on it’s surface appears so ridiculous as to make one question its seriousness.
Short of using nuclear weapons, it is dificult for me to comprehend how one would INTENTIONALLY kill MORE civilians than by crashing TWO jumbo jets full of people into two of the tallest office buildings in the world…during the beginning of the work day…in the most densly populated city in the US. Since 9/11 was the worst terrorist attack in history, I would say that BY DEFINITION, Osama succeded in MAXIMIZING civilian casualties. It would been just as easy, if not easier, to attack those buildings at 3:00am when they were unoccupied so please don’t give us that shit about "duhhh…I don’t dink it was intentional:confused: ".
This is outrageous. It is bin Laden’s stated intention to kill as many American troops and civilians as he finds necessary to force the withdrawal of the US from the Holy Lands.
Let me quote: “On that basis, and in compliance with God’s order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims: The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies–civilians and military–is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.”
To say that large numbers of American civilian deaths were not the desired result of the WTC attacks is to defy the clearly stated intention of Al Qaeda, common sense, and, in my opinion, a grip on reality.
In regards to the OP, of course the question is relevant, but that doesn’t mean that it is not a stupid question. Civilian deaths were the predictable result of GWB’s actions, but the very intention of UBLs. I think it is a grotesque application of utilitarianism to keep score of body counts as though it is a valid comparative measure of moral actions.
Exactly. And my point is that that question is irrelevent unless you consider the context of the other reasons. It neither justifies the war nor determines that the war was unjustified, in and of itself.
I’m not throwing up my hands, but simply saying that you cannot look at only one aspect of the war (in this case civilian casualities) to determine whether or not the war was justified or not. The hypothetical scenarios I proposed was simply to demostrate that, by manipulating numbers, it is easy to construct a situation where war is either justified or not by a subjective level of “we can’t tolerate this much injustice”.
It’s necessary to look at all the factors to decide if the war was justified. Civillian deaths **do ** need to be considered, just as other factors need to be considered. I read the OP as suggesting that the war could be declared “unjustified” by looking only at civilian casualties. That simply isn’t true.
Which leads me to ask:
Are you intentionally trying to be obtuse, ironic or are you a legitimate ignoramus?
That has to be one of the most bizarre twists of logic and ways to avoid any culpability for one’s action that I have ever heard. It is sort of like saying that if my wife goes out and cheats on me and I go off and murder one of her other male friends, not even the one she cheated with (perhaps because I knew she was attracted to him and thus suspect she might cheat on me with him in the future), it is her fault.
Oh yeah…And, I forgot to add the part about how I had been formulating some plans to murder him…although I hadn’t put anything definite into action…even before I found out that my wife had cheated on me.
Victimology at its pop-con finest.
Bush Admin is a victim. It’s a victim of its harsh enviroment. It’s not responsible for its actions. It’s the equivalent of an impoverished parent being forced to steal bread. :rolleyes:
ummm I was, of course, referencing msmith537’s remarkable comments as to how Ubl removed GWB’s freewill, and thus GWB’s responsibility for his own decisions and actions.
I purposely left this open ended. I suppose it doesn’t stimulate any thought for you?
I’m not yet certain what it does mean, but I do feel that it means something and I would like to know what it is. More later on below.
Actually I’m sure the factual answer could be debated endlessly if folks were so inclined. Which deaths should really count and so on. Also, can one justifiably assign the deaths in Gulf War II and Afghanistan to GWB? I anticipated more debate on that count. Perhaps it will surface yet.
Because I have left it open ended I won’t fault you or others for assuming some things about my motivations. But please be aware that is what you have been doing.
This isn’t about justifying the war in Iraq in particular, else why did I bring up Afghanistan?
Rather, I am addressing the tendencies of the policies of the Bush administration. Yes the body count is just a slice of information regarding the events of the past few years, but I think it is important enough to warrant discussion on its own. I personally find it alarming that no matter how good the intentions were said to be there is so much blood on the hands of the US. So much blood, in fact, that it dwarfs the body count of 9/11.
The fact that the Gulf War II and the conflict in Afghanistan came in the wake of 9/11 is a fact that is lost on few. Therefore I find the comparisons relevant. I’m not trying to say “Bush is more evil than Bin Laden.” I’m trying to look at measurable, significant evidence that can determine whether or not the cure (or at least the reaction) is worse than the disease. The most significant and most easily measured evidence to me is a body count. Whether or not GW is well intentioned is irrelevant to me.
msmith537
SimonX
[Moderator Hat ON]
Regardless of what you may think of someone’s argument, do NOT call them an ignoramus here. The “or” doesn’t prevent it from being an insult.
[Moderator Hat OFF]
Well if you want to bring other factors into the discussion, I’m interested but only if you are doing it to specifically show that the comparison is not meaningful. Please address the Bush admins actions directly. I’m not interested in hypotheticals.
So, what are these other factors and how do they render the deaths of innocent civilians incomparable?
I see nothing ridiculous about my statements. There was nothing “maximal” about the casualties of the 9/11 attacks. The intent was to crash planes into buildings. If the intent was to maximize civilian casualties, as puddlegum – and apparently, you and Ravenman – claim, then those were pretty piss-poor targets. Prior to those attacks, any target was potentially available upon which to carry out a jet-plane-as-missile attack. Dump one of those jets into the middle of a professional sporting event, where crowds can easily get over 50,000, and you’ve got many more casualties than what actually occurred on 9/11 (and, again, ObL didn’t even expect to take the towers down - at least not completely, so he got a lot more than he bargained for*). Hell, timing the attacks such that the WTC buildings were more populated would have done the job. As it was, the number of casualties was quite low compared to what “could have been”, which to me indicates that simply maximizing casualties is not ObL’s goal.
Your comprehension appears to be limited, then – see above. Those same four planes could have killed a hell of a lot more than 3,000 people, without significantly more preparation There are any number of times and places where more civilians congregate, and any one of those would have sufficed.
Did I say, “duhhh…I don’t dink it was intentional”? Why, no, I did not. I said those targets were not chosen to “maximize civilian casualties”. How about arguing what I wrote instead of what you think I wrote. I did not say that the attacks were not meant to kill people, I said they were directed at specific targets for specific reasons, and those reasons were not simply to kill as many people as possible.
I would ask you to likewise read what I wrote instead of what you think I wrote. Here it is, since everyone apparently missed it the first time:
This was in response to puddlegum’s statement:
Nowhere did I say that ObL did not intend to kill people. My point was that to state ObL has “gone to great expense and trouble to maximize civilian casualties” is nonsense, since that is clearly not the case for the 9/11 attacks. Lots of people died, but lots more could have been killed, and easily, if that’s really all that ObL and friends wanted.
This thread is getting funny. We have people using death counters, that if you read the fine print are completely biased towards the rabid anit-war/Bush group, and people actually think OBL who is a trained architect didn’t try and maxiimize civilian deaths by planning for planes to crash into buildings which filled to capacity held over 20000 workers, that they wouldn;t collapse and inflict a much more massive count than they did. The survivors are lucky the planes didn’t come in significantly lower and cause those towers to fall earlier.
Interesting suppositions. Care to support them?
Doesn’t this assume that ObL has a deep understanding of how things work in the US…and also a list of locations, times and dates for large sporting events and is able to plan, in advance, the take over of flights so that he could crash them into said sporting events (not to mention find them from the air in a jet plane on a time table). No doubt he COULD get this intellegence, easily, if he really understands how the US works. But this is an assumption and I don’t know how valid it is. Certainly I agree that the targets he picked were symbolic, but they were also picked with killing large numbers of civilians in mind…sort of a two-fer for AQ and Bin Laden.
In addition you have the navigation problem of some pilot who is not that familiar with the US trying to, from the air and off the cuff so to speak, fly a jet plane he wasn’t an expert in and find a sports arena that happens to be filled with people (I’m not sure how easy they are to find from the air to be honest, but I assume less easy than the WTC or Pentagon). Certainly its do-able, but it overly complicates things. Were as the WTC was pretty distinctive and fairly easy to find while flying over NYC…and the Pentagon was also pretty distinctive and mostly on the flight path of the plane that hit it from what I remember.
Finally, ObL had every expectation that the buildings would be full of people (I remember someone saying that as many as 20,000 COULD have been inside but weren’t due to several fluke happenings as well as the early hours…I think it was like 7am wasn’t it?) so its hard to see a better target all around for him that the WTC…its symbolic and its packed full of unsuspecting civilians to give him a huge body count. What could be better. However, even if Bin Laden did NOT want to maximize the body count on this thing, how does that change the equation presented by the OP. Certainly he wanted to kill civilians for killing civilians sake, not as co-lateral damage. Had Bin Laden chosen to go after the Pentagon (a legitimate target IMO), the White House and the Capital, then you would have a good case…he was going after legitimate targets and the casualties, while terrible, would have been of the co-lateral kind. Instead he deliberately targeted a non-military, non-government building packed with civilians with the intent and expectation to kill them.
-XT
Well bsmooth, if you’d like to present some evidence of your own to improve the quality of the thread, please do.
You left off the two sentences right before that one:
“UBL: (…Inaudible…) we calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors.” Link.
You are free to draw your own conclusions, but I take this as very strong evidence that he calculated the attack to attempt to kill the maximum number of people in the floors surrounding the impact. It was not just violent vandalism, it was premediated above all as a mass murder at a location of symbolic importance.
Why else would he hope that the aircrafts’ fuel would collapse more floors? To achieve the aim of killing more people, of course.
What you people seem to be deliberately missing is that the goal of striking THOSE FOUR targets on 9/11 WAS NOT to maximize casualties, IN AND OF ITSELF. The goal was TO STRIKE THOSE TARGETS (most likely for symbolic reasons), AND to kill as many people in the process as possible, GIVEN THOSE TARGETS. It cannot be said, therefore, that ObL JUST goes for high body count. THAT is the goddamn point I am apparently failing to make.
Yes, he tries to kill lots of people. I never said he didn’t. I said, ONCE AGAIN, that his aim is not to simply maximize civilian casualties. IF that’s what he wanted, there are much better targets to be had, and lots more people would be dead right now.
In other words: the diifference between GWB and ObL (in this context) is not so simple as “one strives to minimize civilian casualties while the other strives to maximize them”.
Umm, bsmooth, NO ONE thought that the world trade center towers were vulnerable to collapse as the result of such an event. It took multiple, unforseen, cascading failures to bring the buildings down.
Now Osama is obviously a bright guy, but if he could have figured out that the buildings would collapse, so would have the structural engineers who designed them in the first place, and the design problems would not have existed for bin Laden to exploit.
We’re not up against an evil ubergenius with God-like analytical powers, just a smart guy who knows how to cause trouble.