Actually, what I heard here was that Ben is a drooling idiot who won’t let a little thing like the truth get in the way when he wants to grind his particular axe. C’mon, Ben, surely you can do better than that, no references to the evils of the Crusades or the genocide against Native Americans? It’s all the same thing, bring it all up and apply it to 2003! :rolleyes:
:rolleyes:
Yes, I’m a drooling idiot for pointing out that America was a state sponsor of terrorism within living memory.
Whatever.
Just out of curiosity, what is my particular axe? I always get curious when people make that kind of comment.
missing the point, of course, that to those civilians who died in the raids, I doubt that they really cared if they were indeed the target.
Airman got upset at a comment that was made relative to the POV of the average Iranian/Iraqi citizen whose neighborhood may be targeted by stuff that certainly qualified in their eyes as WoMD/really bad stuff.
yes, I understand that there were bad guys holed up in those neighborhoods, too, and that they indeed were the target, not the innocent civilians. but again, to those civilians who were personally affected, their POV, not a whole lot different than the suicide bomber walking into the Pizza parlor hoping to get Sharon.
the comment as I read it was not in fact saying that American soldiers committed acts of terrorism, but that to those civilians in the bombed out areas, any potential difference between the two may indeed have been moot.
No, Ben, the entire point of strategic nuclear weapons was to prevent the other guy from blowing up your cities full of civilians because you can do the same to him if he tries. It’s called Mutual Assured Destruction and as absolutely insane as it sounds, it kept the peace for 50 years.
Calm the right fuck down, Zenster. rjung did not call Airman a terrorist, and he did not call “shock and awe” or MOAB “terrorism.” He merely pointed out that one of the key goals of S&A and MOAB are to create “terror” among the enemy.
Now, a question for you and Weirddave: What was that USS Cole thingie? Wasn’t that terrorism? How 'bout all those Red Army Faction attacks on U.S. Military personnel in Europe back in the 80s? Those guys in Singapore who were gonna blow up the bus full of American soldiers in the months after 9/11?
None of that’s terrorism, right?
No, Ben, you’re a drooling idiot for applying the morals and standards of 2003 to 1943. It’s called revisionalist history and it has no place in honest historical scholarship. In WWII war was viewed as something involving the entire population of the participating nations and civilians and cities were viewed as legitimate military targets, besides which it was not possible to take out the airplane factory without also obliterating the area for blocks around it. It was accepted with very little debate. Here’s a good example, brought to mind by a recent thread. Was Abraham Lincoln a racist? By modern standards, yes, he would be considered to have racist ideas. In 1860 he was something of a progressive, and this lead him to do things that would turn out to be major steps forward in the concept of all men being created equal being accepted by the population at large. The fact that today we don’t view civilian populations as legitimate military targets comes in large part, I believe, from the 50 years of living in a world where they were, as you mentioned earlier. We couldn’t get to this point without living through the earlier one. We grew as a society and as a species. Undoubtedly, 200 years from now, our attitudes today will be viewed as quaint or perhapse barbaric.
Oh and let’s not forget the Marine barracks in Lebanon. I suppose they mistook it for a day care center.
Kindly piss off.
My post was not directed at rjung. Did I mention that person’s name anywhere in my last post?
DID YOU EVEN READ MY FUCKING POST?!?
Why is it that I have to keep asking this same question so often?
Considerable strategic and tactical thought was applied by the Allies to the express purpose of terrorizing the German civilian population and outright incincerating the Japanese population. The aforementioned Curtis LeMay remarked that if the Japanese won the war, he would surely be tried for a war criminal.
One could not help but mention the bombing of Dresden, so memorably depicted by Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five.
Clearly, then, concern for civilian casualties is a relatively recent vintage. Just as clearly, it is an improvement over mechanical savagery. But weirdave is quite right aboutits fairly recent vintage.
Exsqueeze me, but nuclear tipped cruise missiles were specifically designed to take out enemy ICBM locations. A hardened missile silo requires a direct hit within less than 100 meters with a proper sized nuke. ICBMs (at 500 meters?) did not have that sort of accuracy. Our cruise missiles have an accuracy of 10 meters.
This is one of the principal technological advances that left the Soviets out in the cold. We stopped targeting military sites with weapons that could backwash into civilian populations. Instead, we refined our missile accuracy to the point where decapitating strikes were possible. This is one of many elements that won us the cold war.
Yes, MAD worked for decades but we have, to some degree, progressed beyond that. No thanks to the current administration’s ridiculous lusting after mini-nukes and “negation” of low earth orbits.
wring, please accept this in the spirit of decent debate.
Sharon does not hang out in Israeli pizza parlors.
Iraqi leadership purposely sequestered itself and military functions directly in the midst of civilian populations.
I think it is very wrong to compare more legitimate and frequently avoided collateral civilian casualties with the results of a homicide bomber.
DID YOU ANSWER MY FUCKING QUESTION ZENSTER?!? DO YOU ALWAYS TYPE IN CAPSLOCK? DID YOU FORGET TO TAKE YOUR RITALIN THIS EVENING!!?
Jeez, dude, get a grip.
Followup question here: if a person were to blow up, say, a US military vessel stationed in, oh, I don’t know, let’s say Yemen… would this entirely hypothetical person be a terrorist or merely a soldier?
**
Please Google the phrase “No True Scotsman” and then return to the discussion.
Just out of curiosity… when exactly did America’s soldiers become the flawless moral specimens they are today?
[On preview] minty green beat me to the USS Cole question. But still… answer please?
Quite frankly the firebombing of Hamburg, and Dresden, and the nukes dropped on Hiroshima, and Nagasaki were designed for some pretty major civilian casualties. Killing those civilians was intended to make their governments stop doing what it was the bombers were upset about. You’re right that civilians were regarded as part of the state’s infrastructure and when states were at war the civilians were considered fair game. Here’s the sticking point. For many terrorists, they believe they ARE at war and they apparently didn’t get the memo that Weirddave and a great many others believe these types of tactics are now verboten even during wartime. They still believe, as the US once did and may again at some point, that civilians are legitimate targets.
The military capabilities of the average terrorist organization are far more limited than the Allies during WWII. Precision strikes against modern militaries/militarially protected government infrastructures are simply not possible for them. It strikes me as pretty damn unfair that you’re demanding a disenfranchised group of people who are AT WAR, arguably with pretty damn good reason, oppressed should be held to the same standards of precision and minimal civilian casualties as the most capable and well-equipped military force on the planet. The only weapon they have is terrorism. If they succeed undoubtedly textbooks two hundred years from now will call them “the father of our country” and gloss over the fact that they used tactics which were considered absolutely beyond the pale and would have gotten them hung from the nearest yardarm if they had ever come into custody of the forces they were at war with.
You have no sympathy for their motives and don’t believe they have adequate justification for behaving as if they were at war with us, well, with all due respect, their motives aren’t subject to judicial review in the court of Weirddave. Quite frankly I have absolutely no sympathy for their religiously-based motives and a bare minimum for their ideological/political ones. They aren’t in the court of Mtgman either. If they believe they are at war with the US/Israel/Western World in general, then they are. You believe the tactics they are using in this war are beyond the pale and they should be hung from the nearest yardarm if ever they fall into our custody(or at least taken out of circulation even if you don’t advocate actually killing them). If they “win” then they get to write the history books and Osama goes down in history as a brilliant tactician who used his meager forces to grind down the far superior military force of his opponents.
By the way, did you know George Washington was a wanted terrorist in his day?
I agree there needs to be a line between “Acts of War” and “Acts of Terror”, one being justifiable, the other being flat out wrong(well, until the wheel turns and the books are re-written at least). I just don’t think either of us has the moral, legal, or other authority to draw it.
Enjoy,
Steven
You know, it strikes me that there’s a pretty good Great Debates thread begging to be started here. Anyone want to take the opportunity to ask about the difference between legitimate warfare and illegitimate terrorism?
mg, take a stress pill and chill dude.
Well, duh, golly gee, I guess terrorists have hit some military targets too. That, like, totally slipped my mind.
Now go and count all up the civilian attacks versus military targets in the last forty years and tell me who terrorists target the most. Isn’t that why they’re called “terrorists?”
All done?
Good, now piss off!
minty: Unfortunately that question already has an answer. The answer is “The person who wins gets to decide”. We may go back and forth for quite a while on the semantics and various value judgements, but the reality won’t change.
Still, that didn’t stop these guys.
Enjoy,
Steven
Oh, and minty, here’s one for the dopefest radar
>>>Think the Sharks would be “Shocked and awed” by the superior firepower they were facing?<<<
The fuck are you talking about? A targeted, focused scrimmage (like a football game) can employ shock tactics to benefit from the moderate “collateral mental damage” of a psyche-out. This is real life – these are bombs, not paintballs. And we’re talking scaring the living fuck out of troops so that they lay down their arms – but those bad guys are SURROUNDED by innocent people.
My mother suffered through scatterbombing in Nürnberg when she was a little girl. She says that was a cakewalk compared to what she’s heard about the sustained pounding, the deafening howl of Shock and Awe, and she has nightmares, at 65, about a CAKEwalk.
In my opinion, this tactic is no better than the Khan sacking support villages to collapse an army.
Well, I’d call it being an odious little shit.