Subject:
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Re: More on Palestine
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Wed, 10 Oct 2001 02:27:30 GMT
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Viewed:
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565 times
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Ross Crawford wrote:
> I agree that there's no single "catch-all" definition of terrorism. There's a
> bit of a discussion about it here
> http://www.terrorism.com/terrorism/bpart1.html.
>
> A quote from there: "The essence of terrorism is the intent to induce fear in
> someone other than its victims to make a government or other audience change
> its political behavior."
Hmm, I'm not sure this is a workable definition. I think this is the
general purpose of most military action (just about no military action
expects to eliminate much more than a fraction of the enemy forces, what
it seeks to do is eliminate enough to strike fear into the rest that
they surrender or flee. The overall attempt of course is to force the
enemy leaders to give up their cause).
One thought I have as a way to characterize terrorism vs.. normal
military and political activity is that it's conduct does not expect
normal diplomatic channels to have any validity. I don't think bin Laden
expects us to invite him to sit down and work out our differences. On
the other hand, we expected that by dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki that the Japanese would come to the table.
I think by this definition, there is a real difference between bin
Laden's actions, and at least some of the Palestinian's actions. I think
at least some Palestinians do want to get Israel to come to the table in
earnest. I'm even willing to believe that Arafat has such desires
(though I'm not sure he's willing to make the hard choices which will
need to be made for peace to occur).
To your other comment on the effectiveness of the bombs, from everything
I've read, the U.S. fully expected to have to fight house to house if
conventional means of bringing the war to Japan were to succeed. The
expected casualties were many times the actual casualties from the
bombings. Also, the resulting Japan would probably have been so ravaged
as to be much harder to bring back into the fold, and it's people far
more resentful. What the bombs did was demonstrate the absolute futility
of continuing the fight (never mind that we had just played our only
trump cards). I'm also not convinced that we truly understood the scope
of damage which would be caused (remember, prior to these bombs, only
limited tests had been conducted). Dropping a bomb in an unpopulated
area also would not have been effective since it would have used one of
the bombs, and not really shown anything [wow, you kicked up a big cloud
of dust...]).
Were they the only choice? No. Were they the best choice? Maybe not.
Were they a good choice? I think so.
Frank
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: More on Palestine
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| (...) a (...) in (...) Neither am I. I don't think the Terrorism Research Centre intend it to be either. As I said, I don't think there is a single "workable" definition of terrorism. (...) However most military action is directed at military (...) (23 years ago, 10-Oct-01, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: More on Palestine
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| (...) and a (...) and time (...) out at (...) minimizing the (...) applied (...) WTC as (...) Thanks, Tom. I agree that there's no single "catch-all" definition of terrorism. There's a bit of a discussion about it here (URL) quote from there: "The (...) (23 years ago, 10-Oct-01, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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