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Author | Topic: Just what IS terrorism? | |||||||||||||||||||||||
contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Tjhuats complete sophistry. It is exactly this apologetic that annoys the hell out of me. "yes sir I blew the civilians head clean off but I didn't mean to" "Thats OK son, it would only have been evil if you had meant to do it". Thats just simply an apologetic for killing non-combatants. It is completely, totally, hypocritical.
quote: Yes. But only as a demonstration that the term is meaningless, emotive propaganda.
quote: I do not care about INTENT becuase it is unverifiable - a commander who gave such an order would be unlikely to admit to it. It is terrorist in FACT, regardless of nominal intent. Allegations have already been made that exactly this is in fact happening in Falluja right now and has been happening in Iraq since the occupation began. Please refresh your memory of article 2 and 3 of Convention IV signed in Geneva:
quote: quote: No, I didn't: please read whatbI actually wrote. What I said was, an army can say IT HAD TO DO IT under the circumstances, it cannot say it DID IT BY ACCIDENT. It did not do it by accident, it did it deliberately and with malice aforethought. As the Convebntion makes clear, ALL civilians in a combat area are protected persons and the parties in combat have international treaty obligations to protect them AS A MINIMUM to the level laid oput above. Asserting that it "accidentally" killed civilains while knowingly fighting in a civilian area is very definitely a violation of the provisions of the Convention protecting civilians; it is abundantly clear that such a force did NOT undertake its duty of care to civilian poulations; the "accidental" defence is no more appropriate here than a burglar claiming he "accidentally" killed the householders in the course of his crime.
quote: Well, my difinition MAY reduce civilian casualties by denying formal armies the fig-leaf to hide behind which allows them to claim they killed civilians "accidentally". But I do not in fact expect that to actually happen. Furthermore, I do not accept that there are any "illegitimate" tools of war, and I accuse those who make such claims of gross hypocrisy, especially when they make this claim in company with apologetics for knowingly murdering civilians.
quote: Nonsense - specifically your formulation offers an EXCUSE for killing civilians, the very opposite of stigmatising it. Under your definition, anyone can escape the claim of terrorism by saying it was accidental.
quote: Well, thats just pragmatism - no-one will feel bound by such rules in total war. Thats exactly why the Western states and others possess ICBMS's measured by their capacity to vapourise concentrations of civilians in an instant. According to you, no army should possess such weapons because they can never be used without intentionally killing civilians - but they DO possess them anyway. Thats just real life - deal with it.
quote: They can not and will never adopt this - because total war will necessarily require direct attacks against the enemy population. It's a pipe dream.
quote: I'm afraid thats completely futile. Imagine you had state A that obeyed your rule, and therefore could not use nukes against cities, and state B who did not obey the rule. Who's going to win? Furthermore, after the first of state A's cities is turned into a miles high cloud of radioactive ash, do you really think there is any prospect that the populace of state A will not feel the populace of state B are their direct enemies? Again, its a naive pipe dream.
quote: More Utopianism. Most states that have the draft also have provisions for the imprisonment of draft dodgers or for sanctions including execution. Cowardice in the face of the enemy is almost always grounds for summary execution in any army. Conscripition is not a gentle hippy voluntary process - it is the state demanding military service from its citizens regardless of their wishes, and backed up with the full military power of the state. There are no "voluntary conscripts" - if they are volunteers, they are not conscripts. All consription is force, whether a gun is used there and then, or the power of the state merely threatens in the backiground.
quote: Thats becuase there IS no operationally useful definition of "terrorism" any more than there is a useful definition of "evildoer".
quote: I don't consider any military operations to be "acceptable"; some may or may not be understandable in terms of the experience of the actors. However, it is not I who is ignoring the reality of war at all: as I have already pointed out, my charge is that you cannot fight in civilian areas and claim that you killed civilians accidentally. If you choose to fight in civilian areas, you are CHOOSING to kill civilians. I really don't give a shit about the tactical implications - I am not honour-bound to rationalise the actions of people who attack cities full of civilians, or to find answers to their intractable problems. One of two cases applies: either you go in because the military situation demands it, and you honestly accept responsibility for your actions, or you don't go in. If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.
quote: I do not see any distinction between guerillas and any formal army, appart from the level of equipment. There are no such things as terrorists any more than there are such things as fairies - it is a purely propagandist semantic device. I consider the legitimacy of acts of violence to be moot, because such acts are generally committed only when people think they are legitimate. If they didn't think they were legitimate, they would not have done it.
quote: Thats right. The definition is meaningless, that is exactly what I have been arguing. It is purely a propaganda term without any objective reality to describe. I only argued that the definition that resorts to "political influence" is at least more cogent, and more objectively identifiable, than a definition that relies on deducing intent which can never be objectively observed. But you are correct in saying that this has the result of including formal armies. Whats the problem with that?
quote: I think you grievously over-estimate Clausewitz's influence. How else do you explain the mass butchery of conquored cities in Classical warfare? The fact of the matter is that war does not occur exclusively between armies as entities distinct from their populations - that is an Idealistic abstraction. Armies are expressions of their populations, and thus real war always tends to turn into combats between equipped civilians. This is all the more pronounced in the modern era in which we have no warrior culture, very very few people train to be combat specialists, and almost ALL combatants are really civilians in uniform by comparison to real career fighters like knights or samurai.
quote: Well, if you persist in that definition, then any act of war in a civilian area cannot be anything other than the deliberate targetting of civilians, becuase that outcome is a known and inevitable consequence of the act. That makes US forces in Falluja and Hue terrorists, period. This message has been edited by contracycle, 11-25-2004 06:13 AM
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Fair enough
quote: Right, let’s bear these in mind.
quote: I'll happily concede that it is. But just as you claim that the provisions have been "shown" to be insufficient, I can and will contend that this definition is also insufficient for reason I will lay out below.
quote: The generally recognized right to self defense. I'm well aware that this is a dubious quality in war conditions, but I point out that this common recognition that, unsurprisingly, a person confronted with violence or who believes themselves to be confronted with violence, will respond like wise. Now the problem arises that seeing as militaries are presenting such threats, and if they are killing civilians regardless of whether they claim to be doing so accidentally or deliberately, then a civilian may have a reasonable belief that they are under threat and seek to defend themselves AS A CIVILIAN, and not as a member of one of the forces. They have not in that sense "taken part in hostilities" any more than someone who defends themselves against a mugger has implicitly joined the police force. The net result of this is as I have already described: analysis of the event depends on who survived, and corpses cannot testify in their own defense. Thus de facto, any civilian can be killed with near impunity.
quote: Correct - because that is what we see happening. The US just invaded a city of a qua5rter of a million civilians, used grossly excessive force, and justifies it all on the basis of necessity. Now, how can I or anyone object to the US's self serving interpretation of the events and conditions? The US refuses to be subject to international war crimes tribunals, so the only judge of its compliance with these provisions is its own view. And what that means in practice is, it can do what the hell it likes - and does - with impunity. That is why these terms in isolation are not sufficient to justify the distinction you claim - because while you correctly describe what the provisions allow, that is not what we see actually happening in Falluja, or Grozny, or Hue.
quote: Thus for example, the civilian hospital in Falluja was determined by the US alone to be a military target on the basis of "intelligence" and bombed. Nobody has been held accountable for the fact that there were no militants in the hospital and this was purely an attack directed at a civilian target in fact. Once again: who is to hold such a formal army to account for its actions, and how is that to be implemented? Without such measures any army can and will adopt the most self serving position it can. The entire war against then Palestinians by Israel has been bedeviled by exactly this problem.
quote: well that’s rather difficult when the reports we get are almost entirely under military reporting restrictions and by embedded journalists; the result is we cannot know - and you certainly cannot claim to know that US actions in Falluja have been operating on this principle, given the attack on a hospital mentioned above (itself a continuation of precedent established by US attacks on hospitals in Bosnia and the Sudan). Certainly, The UN has specifically claimed that US forces are NOT adhering to this criterion.
quote: quote: The force of law among wealthy, organized states with formal armies. As I contended from the beginning, it is a self-serving definition that is routinely violated with impunity by such states. The fact that a propaganda term has passed into law does not make that term any less propagandist.
quote: It's not conceivable that it is being abused - it IS being abused, right now, in Falluja. The US quite plainly uses these provisions to do exactly what it is supposed to not be doing: for example, the use of phosphorous artillery shells in cities, which are necessarily imprecise and may cause casualties through secondary explosions. The US also uses depleted uranium ammunition which causes civilian death well after the conflict is over; and it uses cluster-bomb munitions with a built-in 10% failure rate that are guaranteed to cause civilian casualties. So we are back where we started: the US, as so many other armies, pays lip service to these provisions but flagrantly violates them - and universally defaults to claiming accident any time any civilian is killed. The only difference between formal armies and terrorists is the degree of responsibility they assume for their own actions, and it is the formal armies who are lax in this regard.
quote: Well, compare WHAT with Al Qaeda? They gave due warning that necessary targets in the US would be struck; they have decide in their own purview that the WTC was a necessary military target as a component of infrastructure just like NATO did when bombing TV stations in Serbia. Their other targets have been primarily military, such as the USS Cole. What is the distinction you draw between AQ and the USA? This is exactly the crux of the matter, and all your rationalization has done is show that formal armies use exactly the same process of target identification: if there are civilians there we just say "too bad" and do it anyway. After all, I say again: no state in possession of nuclear weapons whose primary purpose is the elimination of enemy population centers can possibly claim that it has real intent to obey these strictures, nor can it cry crocodile tears when on the receiving end of the same hypocrisy. It remains the case that the people actually identified as terrorists will be poor, and all apologetics will be deployed to rationalize the exact equivalent actions by a state military with an appropriate propaganda system.{spellcheck by admin) This message has been edited by AdminPhat, 12-09-2004 03:49 AM
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: I think the laws of war are a good idea, to an extent, but am wary of endorsing them outright because they were forumlated by states with regular armies in the interests of those states. I see a direct analogy with the modern situation and that of the feuydal world, when the gravest crime was to be a "rebel". Same methods, same goals, but one is recognised and thus legitimate, and one is not.
quote: Not regardless of intent - I say that intent is a duplicitous measure. Becuase everyone can and will claim the moral high ground of intent. Only actions matter, and knowingly carrying out an action that results in civilian casualties remains knowingly killing civilians.
quote: Your attack on this point moves immediately to the rights and priviliges of recognised states in war. But war is not only fought between states, as is abundantly clear.
quote: So, if I use my gun on Monday to defend myself against the Iraqi resistance, and on Tuesday to defend myself against the occupation forces, I am now a combatant on both sides, and can be killed by both sides with impunity. What better demonstration can there be that in effect civilians have no rights whatsoever.
quote: Well clearly it does in fact. If the US chooses to disagree with observers of its actions, and refuses to prosecute, what can we do? How then can there be any expectation that such actions will be punished? Your argument would be more compelling were it not the case that the Us refuses to submit its forces to such legal judgement for fear of "political motives". The presumption is abundantly clear: US forces can do no wrong. Seeing as the most powerful state refuses to accept binding judgements, and starts from an a priori assumption of its own innocence, how can anyone expect that justic will be done? It was striking that during the Abu Ghraib scandal, it came to light that an internal investigation by US forces into complaints by prisoners was handled by going to the accused soldier only and asking him whether the allegations were true. The people making the allegations were not interviewed, and their opinion was not solicited. The individual was cleared on the basis of his own evidence. What, therefore, makes you so confident that these crimes will be noticed and punished? People are clearly getting away with murder.
quote: Umm well no, not any more than any of the other cases - such as the bombing of Kosovo - that such allegations have been made. The US just dismisses as enemy lies; witness now republicans declaring the the UN is sympathetic to terrorists.
quote: Ah yes of course - when Russians use excessive bombardment of a city, its a crime. When Americans use excessive bombardment, its not. I have already pointed out that it will be a long time before we know what really happenedin Fallujah, becuase all the jouranlists are embedded on only one said. Even so though, the US administration has not been slow to criticise Al Jazeera for reporting stories that do not agree with the official Us version. Human rights agents on the ground have severley condemned Us actions as displaying contempt for the very principles of human rights but you cavalierly dismiss this. How then can I expect you to police yourself, when your starting position is that any allegation is a malicious falsehood?
quote: I'm well aware of that - its exactly what justifies AQ's actions. But when struck by AQ, the immediate response was blind incomprehension that anyone would hold the US accountable for its crimes. It is precisely because there is such a record that the US is so hated; and all the signs are that it continues to believe that its military might is such that it can continue with impunity.
quote: Erm, yes - these are both excellent cases of FAILING to address the problem. Abu Ghraib was not substantially different from Guantanamo - it is abundantly clear that the problems in the US military are insitutional, and most certainly not the fault purely of "rogue individuals". The US response in both cases has been wholly unsatisfactory, hanging out a scapegoat, and serve to whitewash the military proper of accountability. Hence, the problem will and does continue.
quote: How can you demonstrate to my satisfaction that the belief was reasonable? All I have to go on is your word. As I have pointed out before: this acts as a get-out-of-responsibility-free card that can be played in any circumstance, rendering civilians totally unprotected in fact.
quote: Except it never will do, for this may compromise its intelligence gathering assets. And after all, we already have grave doubts about the quality of US intelligence - do you remember back in '91 the dropping of a pentrator paveway bomb on a bunker full of civilians, but which according to US intelligence was a command bunker? Rank incompetence cannot stand as a universal excuse for killing civilians.
quote: It cannot for the reasons I have already outlined: first, nobody wants to admit to being the bad guy and we already see the US making weak excuses for its conduct, and secondly because not state involved in a conflict of the gravity of WW2 can possibly consider the firebombing of cities illegitimate. I mean look, we already have laws about self defence of states, right? And we can see that the US chose to interpret this in a very self-serving light. So what is to think that the same process will not be applied to whatever definition you proffer? When push comes to shove the formal states are able and willing to massacre whole populations, and have weapons specifically designed for the job. If you were in the position of being a non-nuclear state and advancing that idea, it would be more plausible, but as long as states retain city-levelling weapons any pretense to obeying a law that prevents attacks on civilians is fatuous. It merely exists to demonise the enemy.
quote: Yeesh. Take a look at the history of colonialism. I also note you have still failed to respond to my challenge to explain the slaughter of whole cities during Classical warfare. Or Oliver Cromwells use of the Biblical Israelites terms of surrender-or-massacre during his campaign in Ireland. Or the US behaviour in the Indian wars, which were certainly genocidal (although it is Politically Correct not to admit thisin the US): The use of terror is deeply ingrained in our [national] character. Back in 1818, John Quincy Adams hailed the ‘salutary efficacy’ of terror in dealing with ‘mingled hordes of lawless Indians and negroes.’ He wrote that to justify Andrew Jackson’s rampages in Florida which virtually annihilated the native population and left the Spanish province under US control, much impressing Thomas Jefferson and others with his wisdom. Noam Chomsky I did not know how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream... Black ElkOglala Holy Man, on the aftermath of the Massacre at Wounded Knee How can you say that terrorism inevitably fails? That sounds like a Just World hypothesis, as if immorality authomatically brings about the vengeance of god upon the perpetrator. Very Calvinistic, but wholly unsupportable in the real world. The English terrorised Ireland, and held it for hundreds of years. The Norman aristocracy harried the north, and yet still hold it. Where is this evidence of the automatic failure of terrorism, by states or anyone else? War-making against civilian populations is the historical norm, not the exception. The only reason we presume to address this matter is becuase we hold to a theory of international accountability through global organs - which results only, as I have already pointed out, in the coercive pressure of wealthy states as arbitrator. And the US has frankly elected not to engage in such international systems at all.
quote: No I completely disagree - because the present delusion results in people authorising war on false expectations of what it will entail. When I advanbced these very arguments prior to thw war, I was told I just an American-hater who failed to recognise the humanitarian and surgical strike capacity of the US military. All I was trying to point out is that in environment of fear and hatred, the laws of war are not going to be obeyed: it will be inevitable that civilians are killed and hate engenderdd in the local population. That view was regarded as evil and pernicious, and that is exactly why I violently disaprove of such nominal agreements that can never be obeyed in practice. We must recognise what war means in REAL terms, not what we wish it to mean. This nominal doctrine is unrealistic and merely serves as an apologetic for war - resulting in more lives lost.
quote: Look, CIVILIANS IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY ARE NOT A SHIELD. Again you place is this in terms of guilt and culpability, when we are just talking about people trying to survive amidst warring factions.
quote: Which will not work, because you immediately except such a state if they say they didn't target civilians specifically. It's completely circular and opportunist. It would be great if states did noit use methods gauranteed to cause civilian casualties like airstriking cities or dropping phosphorous artillery on them, but thaey are doing so. And when challenged, they just refer to civil;ians as unimportant collateral damage. Your argument is failing daily here in the real world, becuase we just have to accept the states own say-so and interpretation of events. You see, you say you recognise that attacks on civilians engender only further hatred and resistance. Thats exactly true. But then you excuse attacks that kill civilians by "accident", and fail to recognise that by accident or otherwise, those civilians are still dead, and further hatred and resistance created. Intent is irrelevant, appeals to some abstract ideological position. As long as you allow this easy get-out clause for formal states, real attacks on real civilians will continue, and the hatred and resistance will continue to rise. No amount of excuse or apologetic makes up for a life lost. I remind you of a statement by war criminal Colin Powell when asked how many Iraqi civilians had died in the first Gulf War: "It's not a number I am terribly interested in."
quote: Only because they wore a uniform when they committed their act in practice, though. I'm afraid it is terrorism in every practical, material sense.
quote: Impossible. I point you to the experince of South Africa, unsurprisingly. Again and again the military and police would deploy overwhleming force in the townships. Again and again, bullets and explosives would go wide, or through targets, and kill bystanders. Again and again, the SADF would insist it didn't TARGET noncombatants and again and again non-combatants still died. They were not believed. Even if they had been believed, it would not have mattered, because few will ever accept that their loved ones were shot in the head and that they are just supposed to drop the matter. South Africa and Isael have both used exactly this self-serving justification for decades, completely blind to the fact that it never solved the problem, or even de-escalated it, but instead made it harder and harder, much more intractable, hatred settling down as the basic relationship. And then both - like the US - affect surprise and outrage when the favour is returned merely becuase it was returned purposefully. Your conception of military-on-military conflicts does not accord with the real world or history. The purpose of militaries is to protect the population, and this would not be needed if rival armies refrained from attacking populations. That is why a "terrorist" strategy of killing civilians, and demonstrating the other sides ineffectiveness to impose a military solution or to fulfill the militaries raison d'etre, can bring about negotiations, as demonstrated by both the ANC and the IRA (also showing that your claim that terrorism has never worked is false). Excusing civilian casualties that arise from one side merely because they have not been pushed as far into a corner as the other - because they are wealthier and have more resources - is grossly hypocritical.
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Don't you think that calling someone a terrorist obscures exactly such discussion points?
quote: Whats good for the goose is not good for the gander, eh?
quote: A fair point but: it is precisely my contention that these laws quite obviously have no limiting effect, becuase they allow such an easy excuse. If these laws cannot prevent such criminality as Falluja or Hue, what good are they?
quote: Really. Can you explain what sanctions the US has suffered as a result of its illegal invasion? I am not aware of any.
quote: I do not accept that at all. There are credible reports that instructions to carry out the evils of Aby ghraib and Guantanamo came from Rumsfelds office and he is peronally culpable. And yet he remains in office as scapegoats are imprisoned. There is a clear failure of responsibility, and a clear failure to take on board the gravity of the offence.
quote: So de facto, civilians in any war zone cannot look to either force to carry out their Geneva Convention obligations to make serious efforts to avoid civilian casualties. Equal to your point, if you are shooting at a civilian, you are trying to kill that civilian, regardless of whther this is by "accident or othersie. This is the opoprtunistic bias in your argument as I see it: the actions of uniformed combatants are interpereted from a very subjective sense of personal danger, but the civilians reactions are denied these quite natural responses and they are held as culpable for them.
quote: No, the US has WHITEWASHED its own military. Which again is exactly part of the problem - no matter how inadewuate and dismissive the reponse given by a formal state to such serious allegations, there is no mechanism by which to compel that state to clean up its act.
quote: The exact statement - I think it ewas by Rubin - was that the US would not submit itself to such an organ because the only time accusations would be levelled would be by politically motivated enemies launching mischeivous allegations.
quote: I'm afraid I believe it is a whitewash. Please see the human Rights Watch report on Abu Ghraib and systematic abuses of human rights in multiple fields: "The 38-page report, "The Road to Abu Ghraib," examines how the Bush administration adopted a deliberate policy of permitting illegal interrogation techniques and then spent two years covering up or ignoring reports of torture and other abuse by U.S. troops." Bush Policies Led to Abuse in Iraq | Human Rights Watch I much prefer the analysis of independant investigators than an investion carried out by the same military as would have to carry the blame. They have an understandableand predictable, but no less unreliable, motive tyo interpret events in the best possible light. Again and again the "investigations" of the Us government into these crimes have been decries as inadeuate, and yet still nothing is done.The guilty go unpunished - only the rank and file suffer. We also know for example, that:"The confidential Jan. 25, 2002, memo, first reported last month by Newsweek magazine, was written by the White House counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, and urged Bush administration officials to declare captives in the war on terror exempt from the Geneva Convention. It said that otherwise, Americans might be subject to "unwarranted charges" of committing or fostering war crimes." So quite blatantly, the classification of prisoners was a prelimary to the purposeful use of torture - knowing this would violate human rights - authorised at very senior levels. And Gonzales has not been reprimanded - he has been promoted. 404 Not Found
This stands in stark contrast to the claim in the report you linked that "Neither Department of Defense nor Army doctrine caused any abuses." This is a blatant lie considering the preparations that the DoD underook to shield its personnel from "unwarrented" charges, and arguing that prisoners should be reclassified specifically so they could be tortured. "According to the author of the 19-page UN report, "Torture, and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment," "The condoning of torture is, per se, a violation of the prohibition of torture." The study, by UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Theo van Boven, points out that "legal argument of necessity and self-defense, invoking domestic law, have recently been put forward, aimed at providing a justification to exempt officials suspected of having committed or instigated acts of torture against suspected terrorists from criminal liability." But, van Boven says, "the absolute nature of the prohibition of torture and other forms of ill-treatment means that no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability, or any other public emergency, may be invoked as justification for torture." According to Francis A. Boyle, who teaches international law at the University of Illinois, "As White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales originated, authorized, approved, and aided and abetted grave breaches of the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions of 1949, which are serious war crimes." "In other words, Gonzales is a prima facie war criminal. He must be prosecuted under the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. War Crimes Act," Boyle told IPS." Furthermore, Boyle points out that should Gonzales enter a country signed up to the international anti-torture bodies, the police forces in those states would be under treaty obligations to arrest him and hold him for trial as a war criminal, as was attempted with Augusto Pinochet. The report produce by the USA is a whitewash, is seen to be a whitewash, and far from supporting your claim that the USA is undertaking due diligence in relation to its human rights abuses, it is actively concealing and condoning these abuses.
quote: Becuase they demonstrate the inability of the US to accept criticism from foreign sources, so there is no prospect of any real or serious investigation of any war crime committed by Americans.
quote: I certainly agree it is weak and overused. But as you have conceded, there is no mechanism to compel the Us or any other state to show its work, as it were. They will refuse, as they have always refused.
[quote] Again, I ask you to provide additional support for your claim. As to the bunker in Baghdad, the fact is it WAS a command bunker, built underneath the area where the civilians were sheltering. From what I remember, the military knew about the bunker, but didn’t know about the civilians. If they had — and this is an allegation which has not (and probably never will be) fully exposed — then I join you in condemning the attack. If they didn’t know about the civilians, then the attack was a deplorable loss of civilian life, but not an illegal or terrorist action.[/quotde] you miss the point. the Us is under Geneva Convention obligations AS A MINIMUM to ensure that civilians are not unnecesarioly caught in the fighting. But the quality of US intelligence is so predictably low and routinely contains errors that it is impossible to claim that due diligence to its convention responsibilities has been carried out. It would be fairer to say that the US is willing to bomb first, based on rumour, and ask questions later. And again - they simply cannot be held to account after the fact.
quote: Which I have already conceded I cannot know because journalists are embedded. But therefore I also reject your rejection of this allegation: it is not invalid to raise this incident precisely becuase the situation is unclear. For you to dismiss it is unnaccaptable; your position appears to be that all benefit of the doubt should be accorded to US forces. Why? You may only dismiss it if you can demonstrate certainly that it was a military outpost; until such time as you can do that the question remains open. Furthermore, seeing as the US forces are the ones with a responsibility in law and a duty of care to the civilians of Iraq, it is most certainly the case that the burden of proof falls to the US. But here is a very interesting remark from the New York Times:
quote: Of course the hospital director disagrees:
quote: Page not found - Truthout
quote: Do you not get news in the US, then? I find this mind-boggling - this has been a persistent criticism of US praxis for more than a decade. You will recall the outrage and horror that folowed the bombings of hospitals, power stations, and TV centres in Belgrade.
quote: None of this is in dispute. The fact that these acts are in fact terrorist acts, but are always described as necessary acts of self defence in the event, is precisely my angle. No definition you or I come to will have any impact on its next time. so the net real terms effect of the formulation you propioses is to premit the demonisation of those combatants too poor to raise appropriate propaganda, or to comnpel their enemy to respect them by the use of main forces suich as tanks an aircraft.
quote: I'm afraid that is just naive. Once again you cannot rise above moralism and employ analysis analysis - I never "justified" anything, I merely OBSERVED that total war is total war. Under those circumstances, killing civilians IS a military goal, because it undercuts the other states productive capacity to manufacture war materiel and man units. Now it may be true that you wish that this would not happen; but wishing is not going to change anything. we know this happesn - it has always happened - and there is no serious prospect that some words on a treaty document are going to change that. So to advance an argument about terrorism based on the naive assumption that formal states will never again massacre civilians in bulk is simply unrealistic. It is a triumph of optimism over realism.
quote: Oh yes right. Like, if I had a car in my garage with the key in the ignition, its unreasonable and unsupported to suggest I might ever drive it. Puhleeze.
quote: I see. An yet Britain is still in occupation in Ireland. How then does it not work?
quote: Well what other mysterious mechanism is going to exact the vengeance of the righteous dead? you seem desperate to convince yourself that terrorism by states "never works", but why should this be true, just because it is aesthetically pleasing? If you kill everyone, there is no-one left to be horrified. If you kill most people and indoctrinate the rest into your culture, nobody will avenge them. If you kill a large number and leave the remainder in semi-autnomy, you are most at risk. State terrorism mostly fails when it cannot complete the job - there is no mystical force of supernatural justice that comes along to right these wrongs. The Romans cruficied reblliuos slaves all the way from Rome to Ostia, where was the righteous judgement that proves that "terrorism never works"? Terrorism works so well that Gibbon declared that Rome was the greatest era humanity had ever seen.
quote: Well that is true in part. I'm fully aware of this aspect of popular resistance. That's exactly whay the invasion of Iraq is doomed, and why it will never be pacified, no matter what brutal methods are employed against the resistsance. And I have already arged why this is the case - it is because you will never be forgiven for the "collateral" casualties.
quote: I'm well aware of this - these form the basis of my argument. Lets look more closely at the Boer War because it is quite relevant - because the Boers fought in khaki and not in formation, they were condemned by the British as irregulars and corwards who did not obey the rules of war - therefore the British were justified in their burning of farms and the camps. This is exactly the antique form of the modern argument to "terrorism" which you are trying to construct. As you point out, this completely failed and brought down the British government of the day, but this achieved little for the Boers who only threw off the Imperial yoke by withdrawing from the Commonwealth in 1961, nearly a hundred years later. Using the term "terrorist" to demonise the Iraqi reistance, or the global reistance to American terror, is not going to achieve anything. It's only going to prolong the inevitable by lending a spurious legitimacy to state terror, a thin layer of self-righteousness. It would be far better if we talked in practical terms of resistance, of sabotage, of revenge strikes, then construct purposefully emotive terms like "terrorist".
quote: Its a pipe dream - as definitely shown by the existing of nuclear weapons. I have dealt with this before - it is simply naivite, and I'm afraid we cannot afford that any more, we have to be realistic.
quote: We have - the ICC. that does not propose unrelaistic solutions like it never happening again, but does allow for occurrences to be prosecuted. That is a step in the right direction resisted by - the USA, what a surprise.
quote: The ATTACKER is constrained? Thats just jaw-dropping. All the ATTAKCER has to do is do is rationalise them as enemies. I remind you that state department said that if Americans went to Iraq as human shields they would be killed as enemy combatants. It is the DEFENDERS who are constrained because it is those civilians they are protecting. Your statement is completely backwards and shows a rank disregard for the lives of civilians IMO.
quote: By who and what? By nothing, so it acheives nothing. But as long as you encourage the use of the term terrorist to indicate an enemy who kills our civilians, as opposed to our dievine enligtenment when klilling their civilians, all you are doing is providing a conceptual framework which excuses yet more violence and resultes in yet more civilian deaths.
quote: I am 100% confident it has nothing to do with civilain casualties at all - every effort by bodies to limit weapons that are most effective against civilians, such as areas denial munitiions and landmines, have been rejected by the US. Or the radiation inflicted on civilians on DU rounds. The inly purpose for increasdingly precise weapons is to provide a cost effective target solution for combat effectiveness purposes - not for minimising civilian casualties.
quote: Yes well funny that you invade a country and find the people in it resist, I mean that obviously makes them evil. Jesus.
quote: Well no - I think thats fatuous. Why not propose that states solve their differences by a game of football? Becuase it cannot be binding - each state has the capacity to ignore the judgement and resort to force. Similarly, if a state refused point blank to attack civilians, it would be held hostage by the first enemy that did not obey those terms, or it would have to abandon those terms to offer a similar degree of threat. So there is no prospect of wars being fought exclusively between militaries, ever. Only of the most trivial and irrelevant of wars are fought in that way. I insist on realism.
quote: Except you are wrong - what I showed is that the people who were denounced as terrorists, and who did attack civilian targets openly as part of their strategy, won the day, achieved international legitimacy and came to power. While then people who declared themselves the righteous agents of justice against terrorists, and who sibnsisted that by contrast to their enemy they only killed civilians by accident, lost and were delegitmised. In every respect it is counter to your argument - it demonstarets that civilians are necessarily the objects if not the subjects of war, and that no degree of excuses and apologetics for killing civilians ever makes it anything other than equivalent to terrorism. but what your doctrine did achieve was the funnelling of resources to South Africas campaign in Angola by the Reagan administartion - so your doctrine of distinguishing between "accidental" and purposeful killing of civilians served only to prolong the fight and reinforce the bad-guys on this wholly spurious basis. That is exactly why your proposition is njothing more than an apologetic for civilian death, and why for example the ANC refuses to accept that terrorist is a meaningful term any more than I do.
quote: Well I don't have time to address that. I genuinely don;t know where to start with such a bizarre claim.
quote: No, I'm afraid you are wroing. I was there - we lost. The NP could not protect the soft underbelly of the state, thats all. The ANC won through terrorism, and were right to do so.
quote: Again thats just naive; the IRA have rightly been described as the mnost sophisticated and most succesful terrorist organ on the planet. to the point that they are encouraged to have a word with groups like the basque separatists and pass on their insight. They brought about the present negiotiations almost entirely on their own iniative; it is true that the British have no ntoiceably demilitarised yet, but that only goes to demonstrate the self-serving duplicitousness that priviliged input to media organs allows. It is exactly that issue that is being negotiated right now. To refer to the ANC and IRA as failures when in both cases their members - without renouncing their methods - have become formal members of the political system is ridiculous. I don't know where you get this nonsense; they have in nrearly all respects achieved their agendas, and the agendas of their enemies have been frustrated. They won.
quote: Is there some reason I am supposed to be worried about an apologist for civilian killings refusing to talk to me? You in severe need of some perspective, my son.
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Yes, I thought this might happen as soon as I saw you with an Admin tag. An reactionary backlash waiting to happen.
quote: No. Since when are my thoughts subject to your approval or anyone elses? This is the same old bullshit; when you don't like a contrary opinion you choose to view as deliberately insulting rather than descriptive. It's very selective and frankly juvenile. This applies to Quetzal as much to you. It is a word; that word has meaning; if it is not descriptive of the subject you are free to explain why. Got that? The fact thnat you resort to rank-pulling, and Quetzal to shamefully running away, demonstrates only that you cannot. Or take responsibility for your arguments. And then,having done this, you still find it inexplicable that I object to the use of deliberately slanderous terms like terrorist! The arrogance is breathtaking. In fact I have more to say. Quetzal has behaved very badly IMO; at no point has he actually acknolwdged the legitimacy of any deployment of violence EXCEPT by a state. I have gone to great lengths to make it clear that a doctrine of acceptable violence formulated around the rights and responsibilities of the state is functionally redundant, and he has never risen to the challenge. An allegation of hypocrisy is perfectly legitimate. I don;t care whether he LIKES it; I neither care nor said that he APPROVES of it; the FACT of the matter is his definiition is IN USE in a hypocrtiical manner. If he doesn;t like it he can go sulk in a corner - and while he and his fellows legitimised the atrocities of the South African state - and that is NOT rhetoric - I don't see why I can't tell it like it is. If she doesn;t like it, maybe he should do something about it. This message has been edited by contracycle, 11-30-2004 10:39 AM
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Marx already told you where it will end - with the eradication of the nation state and the developement of free association among self-defined communities. The change you are seeing is occurring exactly as he predicted, with the rise in technological capacity at the individual level making the enforced patriotism and centralisation of resou5rces by nation states redundant.
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contracycle Inactive Member |
Even better, seeing as you patronisingly title your selective intervention as "rhetorical overload", I ask that you practice what you preach: that the term terrorist be forbidden on the board as nothing more than excessive rhetoric. Well? Gonna step up to the plate?
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Ah yes - you start by by accusing me of rhetorical overload and name-calling, and then suggest that I'm trying to fool you. But if I suggested that this might be hypocrisy this would be another strike against me, wouldn't it? If I wanted to call you names I would fucking do so. Get over your self-importance and parochialism.
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