No, it isn’t that simple, Scylla.
Your example above gives people using similar means for different ends.
The us/them situation involves the use of not-too-dissimilar means for not-too-dissimilar ends.
absolutely.
and of course, you understand that to us, they’re Hitler, we’re Terminex, while in their eyes, the reverse is true.
and to the being that is being killed, it’s doubtful that they’ll care one way or another if it was Hitler or the Terminex guy.
You are joking right? Sarcasm?
No. It really is that simple. The means and ends are entirely dissimilar. Terrorists are not engaging in combat. They are not attempting to accomplish a military goal.
They are causing death and destruction simply for the publicity value of death and destruction.
The military is not seeking publicity value from the death and destruction. In fact excessive death and destruction is hugely negative to a military operation
The terrorist seeks what the military avoids.
It’s night and day.
Wring:
We can equate anything with anything using the blunt tool of moral relativism.
I guess to the guy who got killed when a roofing shingle inadvertently fell on his head, the roofer might as well have been a terrorist.
As Feynman implies concerning relativity, there is a preferred and correct perspective to look at any given problem.
i.e two ships facing in opposite directions can each travel at 60% c. One might therefore beleive that an observer on one ship would see the opposing ship receding at 120% c (a physical impossibility,) according to his perspective.
His perspective however is not the correct one.
If you choose to see things that way, Scylla, good luck to you.
Since you choose to focus on the word military, let me recast it in political terms.
Politician A gathers mindless drones. Politician B gathers mindless drones.
Politician A launches said drones. Politician B launches said drones.
Shit gets blown up. People get killed.
Who was morally correct, politician A or politician B?
I have no interest in giving them a pass. I don’t think we should stop hunting for them(although I’d like actual proof of a government aiding them before we start attacking a sovreign nation, like we had in Afghanistan). I don’t think we should show them mercy if they wind up in our custody. They should be judged as war criminals. They killed people and they should answer for it. Here’s the “they get to write the books” problem. The problem comes in because the people who “win” actually GET passes, not that they deserve them. Winning doesn’t absolve you of your guilt for the atrocities you committed, it simply makes people not want to prosecute you for them. Washington still committed what, in his time, were considered atrocities by targeting officers and employing what we now call guerilla warfare. The raid on Boston Harbor(commonly called “The Boston Tea Party”) was considered a terrorist attack on civilian business infrastructure. These “terrorists” got a pass from their government, but that doesn’t mean they deserved it.
Now, if we’re going to argue absolute morality, which is what I see when I hear someone start down the “terrorism is always wrong” road, then we’ve got to draw some line and say if those tactics were right or wrong. If they were wrong then it was an injustice to see Washington escape trial as a war criminal. Justice knows no borders and no political affiliations. If sniping officers from ambush was wrong, then it was wrong. Washington should have stood trial. If blowing up civilians in a sneak attack is wrong, then it is wrong. The Allied commanders who ordered the firebombing of Dresden and Hamburg were every bit as wrong as bin Laden for his attacks on the civilian infrastructure of the country he was at war with. Both should stand trial.
You see the difficulties here, I’m sure.**
You realize that the American Revolutionaries, at least at first, were a tiny minority of the population, right? The majority of colonists were simply muddling along, it was a handful of rabble-rousers who really started the conflict. Once they had succeeded in bringing attention to it and stoking the fires of outrage in the colonists did it actually become a popular effort(although I’ve seen some cites which claim as much as 80% of the population simply kept their heads down and didn’t aid or hinder the revolutionaries). Much of the support came indirectly through popular outrage against the heavy-handed reprisals by the British in response to terrorist activities like the Boston Tea Party. I’m not quite sure why the requirement for a “freedom fighting” organization has changed since then to now include majority popular support and/or state sponsorship. Ironicially, Al Qaeda had state support/sponsorship. Afghanistan just wasn’t a strong enough state to stand up against the reprisals of the targets of the terrorist tactics.**
I’ve always understood the nature of terrorism. What I don’t understand is the moral absolutist who gives Washington a pass and cries for Osama’s head. The only thing I can see here is that one of these terrorists is “us”(and happened to “win” his war) and the other is “them”(and is soundly getting his arse kicked). We are no different, or better, than them. WE have used terror tactics when we were in their position, and I wouldn’t be suprised if WE would again if we were somehow put in that position again. You want to be a moral absolutist? Fine. Be consistent with your damnnations. If the tactics/goals are wrong then they are wrong no matter who perpetrates them and they are all war criminals. Can’t have it both ways.
Enjoy,
Steven
If you choose to see things that way, Scylla, good luck to you.
Since you choose to focus on the word military, let me recast it in political terms.
Politician A gathers mindless drones. Politician B gathers mindless drones.
Politician A launches said drones. Politician B launches said drones.
Shit gets blown up. People get killed.
Who was morally correct, politician A or politician B?
Where do you people come up with this shit?
You want to know the difference between the current US Military way of doing things (you can start on your sarcastic crap about how they’re moral supermen and such, but you know it’ll just be setting up a strawman) and the way things would be done if Bush-and-all-his-evil-cronies were no better than terrorists?
Current Way: US stealth bomber drops ordinance on a C3 facility in Baghdad (that has, of course, been built wall-to-wall with a hospital). Two laser-guided 1000lb bombs strike the C3 facility, destroying the C3 facility and causing heavy damage to the hospial.
This is unfortunate, but the C3 facility was placed there for a reason. That reason was to prevent the soft, spineless men from a soft, spineless democracy from destroying it. The Americans would never take the chance of bombing a hospital and letting that end up on the evening news. Vietnam taught the world that.
The reasoning behind placing the C3 facility was faulty, of course. The Iraqi government knew that the C3 facility’s location wouldn’t PREVENT an attack. They learned that in Gulf War Part One. Putting the C3 facility next to the hospital, however, would still make for great airplay on TV, however. And let’s face it, the C3 facility was going to be destroyed anyway. Not really a away around that.
But putting it right THERE would get some use out of all those useless invalids in the hospital.
Of course, if US Armed Forces were as bad as all the foaming America-bashers out there, it would have been more like this:
[MOAB drops]
Protesters: You destroyed a hospital!
Bush-and-all-his-evil-cronies: Yup. We also got two day care centers, an orphanage, and the warhouse full of nothing but puppies and kittens! Waaaahahha!
For the record, I don’t like Bush. I don’t like him as a president, and I don’t trust him. To me, he’s kind of like a monkey with a gun. Nobody is entirely sure how he got ahold of it, and he has no idea what he’s doing with it. However, that doesn’t stop him from being a danger to everyone around him.
That’s a far cry from saying that Bush is Satan’s more evil brother, all US soldiers are baby-killing terrorists, and that the US Military deliberately targets civilians.
-Joe
Mtgman,
Of course I understand that the tactics used by the revolutionaries in the U.S. Revolutionary war were often what could be legitimately called “terrorist tactics”, what has that to do with anything? They were fighting for their freedom from what could be seen as an occupying army. If the U.S. is still militarily occupying Iraq in a couple of years and the Iraqi people want them out and use similar methods, you won’t see me trying to make a destinction between the two. I will note that (what would become)the U.S. didn’t send agents to England to wantonly kill civilians, for example. Al-Quada’s attacks on U.S. soil on 9/11 were the wanton slaughter of civilians when the U.S. was not militarily trying to destroy Afghanistan. There is a huge difference between blowing up civilians in another country because you don’t like it and seeking to attack and destroy another countries’ armed forces. Those who are killed are just as dead either way, of course, but intentions and actions do count for a lot. ( not to those innocents killed, naturally, dead is dead, but there is a big difference between attacking a military target with civilian casualties as an unwanted but inevitable by-product and attacking the civilians directly ) That’s not moral absolutism, it’s moral relativism. Morally there is a huge difference between picking up a gun and shooting another person in the head and shooting that same person by accident when you’re cleaning that same gun. The victim is just as dead in either case, however.
You are one fucked-up son-of-a-bitch, Merijeek.
Why was Iraq attacked in the first place? Because of fabricated stories about weapons of mass destruction. Where are they? They don’t exist.
But, it’s a good thing to know that whatever civilians were killed, it wasn’t our fault, it was their fault.
Dickhead.
**
No. You are for attacking him in such fashion without provocation.
You lose all credibility, both personally, and for your arguments when you engage in this behavior. If you strongly disagree, make an argument. Resorting to name-calling has generally signalled a lack of intelectual capital in my experience.
Weirddave - welcome back to the thread. Got any response to my last post to you about appeasement?
Not really, I decided it was pointless to argue with you about this. You accuse me of wanting to have things “both ways” when I have done nothing of the sort and then refuse to listen when I explain myself, so what really is the point? I can always open the door and shout at the wind if I want to argue pointlessly.
Scylla, of all people, tut-tutting over someone else’s name-calling? That’s entertaining.
Note these lines from merijeek, which he considers not to be provocation:
“Where do you people come up with this shit?”
“you can start on your sarcastic crap … but you know it’ll just be setting up a strawman)”
“all the foaming America-bashers out there”
“saying that Bush is Satan’s more evil brother, all US soldiers are baby-killing terrorists, and that the US Military deliberately targets civilians.” (nobody is saying that).
Yep, that signals a loss of all credibility and lack of intel[l]lectual capital, and me-tooing it is even worse. Both of you need a better appreciation for, and grip on, the facts before proceeding.
Is that you, mom?
Seriously, though, it’s amazing that you managed to miss the point of my post so completely.
I’m not saying that it’s Achmed’s fault for being blown to bits because he was in the hospital for a sinus infection. I think that it’s the fault of the person who decided to put a C3 facility next to the hospital, knowing with absolute certainty that said facility would be near the top of any military hit list.
As for the WMD, you’re perfectly welcome to re-read my post and see if you can spot any reference to any WMDs. If you run my post through the same algorithms that come up with the Bible Code, you might even find such references.
In all honesty, I really did expect the US forces to find chem and bio weapons. Contrary to the opinion that your little brain just jumped to, however, I didn’t think so because of what Dubya’s administration had to say. I expected it to happen because Hussein’s refusal to provide evidence of the weapons’ destruction indicated to me that they were still there.
Because of Hussein’s actions, I figured that there was one of three possiblities.
First, that the weapons were still there. It really was the most logical explanation due to Hussein’s actions.
The second is that the weapons were exported to other coutries such as Syria or Iran. Personally, I don’t believe that for a second. And, while I’m not like a lot of the America/Bush bashers on this board, the harder Rumsfeld tries to push such an idea, the less I believe it.
The third is, of course, what seems to have happened. Hussein destroyed the weapons…and refused to provide any good proof of it To me, this one seems totally insane, and pretty damned stupid. Thing is, we all knew that Hussein was a sociopath, but I never thought he was stupid.
As for the orignal point of my post, imagine this situation (and boy, we all know how well analogies fly around here, but what the hell):
There is a credible threat that a terrorist group is going to launch a serious assassination attempt at Dubya. So, Dubya has arranges it so that he is surrounded at all times by 50 Iraqi children.
The terrorists take their shot at Dubya, and in the attempt some (or all) of those 50 children are killed.
Who is to blame for the dead children? Anyone short of december would probably blame Dubya. But by your logic, it’s the assassins who are to blame.
Personally, I don’t think that the destruction of Hussein’s regime is a bad thing. I think it was done for the wrong reasons, and it should have been done by Bush #1.
Again, I have no love for most administrations, and this one is lower on the list than just about any. I just object to the idea of the US Armed Forces being likened to a bunch of baby killers who deliberately target civilians. They don’t. If they did, the civilian casualties in Iraq would make Hiroshima look minimal.
-Joe
Wow. That’s a better sumation of my feelings that I ever gave, Merijeek. As long as you’re in my brain, could you look around and see if you can find the memory of where I put the Gettysburgh re-enactment photos? I’ve been looking fo those things for weeks.
Well, I may as well step into this one, since I started it.
The above was due to what was said, of course. By that person’s logic, there’s really no difference between First Degree Murder and Manslaughter. After all, it doesn’t matter to the victim if it was planned or accidental, does it?
Because any comment regarding steps taken by any military (but the USA’s in particular) inevitably brings out comments about how the USA, its people, and its military are “just paragons of virtue who would never hurt anyone unless they were pure evil, and therefore by any American’s logic, everyone killed by an American soldier is obviously evil”. This, of course, would be followed by half a dozen posts, the end result of which would be the US Armed Forces being compared (unfavorably) to the guards at Auschwitz.
Yeah, probably badly phrased. Now read just about any post by elucidator, OlverH, Henry B, or Chumpsky, and you’ll find it graphically demonstrated what that phrase means.
Nobody is saying that? Funny, I guess the references to LeMay (elucidator) and “to be ready to kill multiple innocent men, women and children all of a sudden on the orders of your superiors, without taking time to judge the situation yourself” from xenophon41 don’t count.
Yeah, facts.
-Joe
It means they were terrorists. It means terrorism has been used in the past by the same people who now are waging a “war on terrorism”. It proves the adage, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s Freedom Fighter”. It should give pause to anyone asserting that the US has the high moral ground here. **
Like the Palestinians? Or the RIRA?**
Ok, firstly, intercontinental travel was a WEE bit more difficult back then. I would posit that lack of means was more responsible for the lack of revolutionary attacks against the British mainland than some noble idea that our forefathers were above those sorts of underhanded tactics. Plus there were plenty of Brits to kill right near at hand. It’s not like they ran the colonies from across the ocean via telephone and economic influence.
Now that that’s out of the way. Ever heard of the Privateers? They committed acts of terrorism on the seas. Military ships, merchant ships, all came under fire. Ironically the cannonical first involvement of the privateers was the hijacking of couple of British ships(while the Brits were at church in town) and using them to attack and destroy another British merchant ship. Sounds like terrorism to me. This was in 1775, before the Declaration of Independence or the issuance of the Letters of Marque, BTW. The colonies were NOT officially at war with Britain in anything other than the minds of these “terrorists”.
Agreed. Of course the reality is that if you are at war with someone you hit the targets you can and you skip the targets which are too well fortified. Note that the Boston Tea Party was an attack on a unarmed or lightly-armed merchant ships on the peaceful mission of bringing tea to the colonies. How was this terrorist action on behalf of a small group of militants who were symptoms of a larger unrest any different than modern terror attacks on soft targets by militants who are symptoms of a larger unrest?
I’m not interested in forgiving terrorists for their crimes. What I do want is acknowledgement of the hipocracy of building memorials to privateers who died in prison for their acts of terrorism during the revolutionary war while condemning the actions of other terrorists. WE are not intrinsically better than THEM. In fact, not too long ago, “we” WERE “them”. Acknowledge it is a war. Fight it the best you can. Don’t grumble about underhanded tactics by your enemy. That’s what they’re supposed to do when they’re vastly outnumbered and outgunned. Do what you must, and try to keep as atrocity-free as possible. If you start losing, your people will understand that some of the gloves come off. Don’t bitch that your opponent never even wore gloves, when you’re an 800 pound gorilla going up against a 68 pound weakling the underdog would have to be an absolute idiot to “fight fair.”
Moreover, the gorilla’s don’t get to complain about “them not fighting fair” because, god damnit, when that gorilla was a 68 pound weakling, by god WE didn’t fight fair. If we win, they go up against the wall and we answer for any crimes the enfranchised people wish to hold us to. If they win, then we go up against the wall and they answer for any crimes the newly-enfranchised people wish to hold them to. Cut this holier-than-thou “We’re better than the terrorists” bullshit right out though. It stinks of hipocracy. The only difference between us is one of situation. Trying to turn that into some sort of absolute and enshrining the US as a moral nation fighting the good fight is exactly the kind of revisionist bullshit you flamed Ben for.
Enjoy,
Steven
You are using the No True Scotsman fallacy. You made a statement: Americans do not target civilians in war. You immediately said something to the effect of, “And don’t bring up the massacres in Vietnam, because we don’t do that anymore. They don’t count.”
It’s that “They don’t count” that is the fallacy, Dave. You can’t just append the word “anymore” to your point and instantly render it valid. If that were the case, the following would not be illogical in the slightest:
Enron spokesperson just days before the end of Enron: No, we’re not bad, because we don’t cook the books anymore. We’ve changed!
Idi Amin, currently in exile… er… somewhere (Syria? I forget): Look, I don’t eat people anymore, so don’t call me a cannibal.
Harry S Truman, before Nagasaki but after Hiroshima: Naw, we’re done dropping atomic weapons. We don’t do that anymore.
Adolf Hitler, between Czechoslovakia and Poland: Yeah, I annexed the Sudetenland, but I’m done with my expansionism. I don’t do that anymore.
My point is that your statement that America’s military doesn’t do that stuff “anymore” is immaterial. They’ve done it before.
**
I used the phrase “flawless moral specimens” as a bit of rhetoric, thinking you’d pick up on that. As you failed to do so, I’ll be a tad more explicit: if Mai Lai “doesn’t count” as Bad Americans (Bad! thwap), because we’re “different” now, when did we become “different”?
**
And I think you’re dodging my simple question: the person(s) who blew up the USS Cole – terrorists or soldiers?
Pop Quiz: You made the following statement:
**
What did you put in the blank? Was it:
(a) Terrorist Group
(b) Organized Military
© Belgian Waffle
I’ll save you the suspense of paging back through your posts: it was (a). However, obviously, (b) fits as well.
What’s my point? My point is that I feel you’re being too simplistic and dismissive of the terrorists and their motives. (Warning: I’m going to use a bit of exaggeration here… try not to take me 100% literally and look at what I’m saying, comprende?) You seem to think that these terrorists wake up every morning, twirl their moustaches and cackle evilly about their plans to kill innocent civilians. They do evil for the sake of doing evil (was that in a Bush speech, or am I going crazy?) They’ve got no agenda other than to hurt people.
On the other hand, struggling valiantly against this wicked agenda, is the U.S. Military, sheathed in garments so righteous, they could be from the Book of Ephesians. We selflessly defend the oppressed (er… as long as they’re in a country we care about. Sorry, Rwanda.) and overthrow dictators as if it were our divine duty (unless, of course, we installed said dictators).
Such a narrow, good-versus-evil characterization ignores and disregards the religious, political, cultural, and economic reasons that make the putative Good Guys a little less good and the would-be Bad Guys a little less bad… but both more Real.
Look, I’m not trying to play Sally Struthers here. I’m not an ACLU lawyer who feels that blowing up skyscrapers is a form of expression that should be protected and maybe even encouraged. However, I implore you to remember that, while you and I disagree with the methods the terrorists use, they do have their reasons… even if said reasons are incomprehensible to anyone (except maybe Collounsbury).
I tell you what, Dave. I’ll concede that the US Military (recently, at least) is a far sight better at sparing civilians… which is, of course, a glaringly obvious fact, if qualified with the proper phrases. In turn, you concede that these terrorists DO have an agenda and do not simply delight in killing babies and blowin’ shit up just for the hell of it.