Just what IS terrorism?

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The US would point to a number of UN resolutions and towards acts of Congress to say that a legal basis was laid

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They would say that, but only as a propaganda exercise. The UN has made it abundantly clear that no prior resolution can be construed as an open-ended licence for war. There was no legal justification of the invasion of Iraq whatsoever.

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IMHO, acts of war can be very bad, they can even be crimes. There are even standards, War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity, and established procedures (even if ineffective) to address such behaviour. But they are not terrorist acts. Regardless of the motive, if committed by a recognized government, it is not terrorism.

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So what defines terrorism is some notional recognition.... by who? By the UN, just because it happens to be able to fulfill that role now? What happens if country A recognises a state, andf country B refuses to recognise that state, what then?Your assesment is an adequate description of the hypocritical realpolitik of Imperialism, but it has no basis in either logic or morality. Furthermore, I cite that very point to demonstrate the illegitimacy of the nation state. Terrorism is a word the rich use to justify killing the poor. It is class war by another name.This message has been edited by contracycle, 11-17-2004 10:46 AM

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Sure there is. One of the rights of a Nation State is self protection. It is legal to attack another nation that is about to attack you, even through preemptive attack.

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Only in the face of immediate and imminent danger. For example, a huge buildup of armoured divisions on your shared border. Not rumour.Please note that the US was NOT given permission to invade by the UN or anyone else. It was not facing imminent attack, and its own paranoia is not sufficient explanation. The US invasion of Iraq was quite clearly against international law, as Kofi Annan has made abundantly clear.

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The issue is whether or not the US can make a case that the US was threatened by Iraq.

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No that it NOT the issue. Even if Iraq had been demonstrated to have WMD, and it had been demonstrated to be concealing them, that would STILL have not constituted an imminent intent to launch a strike against the USA.

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This is not the thread to discuss that issue, but it is clear atleast that Nation States do have a legal right of self defense.

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Is that true? Because, we seem to insist that the people defending the nation-state of Iraq are "terrorists" or "insurgents", so clearly we DON'T bbeleiev in the right of self-defence at all.

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That issue comes up fairly often, for example over which is the real China. A Nation State comes about through internal organization and the consensus of other Nation States.

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So whats the answer then? You seem to have avoided giving it. I didn;t asjk how nation states come about - I asked whether the violence of a state whose status is in dispute qualifies as terrorism or not.If China does not recognise Taiwan, is China entitled to invade Taiwan and declare all the defenders illegal combatants as the US did in Afghanistan?

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First, right now, the Nation State of Iraq does not exist. There is no Iraqi Government.

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I don't believe a sitting government is necessary before a state to exist - is it your view that the state of France disapeared during the Nazi occupation? Or, how about Spain when occupied by the Napoleonic French?Regardless, the US has acquired ALL the legal obligations of the Iraqi state, including the duty of care to its citizens. Iraqi's have, under the Geneva convention, the right to form citizens militias to resist occupation by a foreign power. They are in the right, the US is in the wrong, in every respect.

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If China invaded Taiwan that is exactly the legal position they would take.

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You're STILL avoiding the question. I didn't ask what position the Chinese state would take - I asked what your formula says IS the case. Is resistance by Taiwanese forces construed as terrorism in YOUR eyes because they are not recognised by China, yes or no?

But why is it terrorism just because they are not a nation state? Why do you want to apply such an emotive term at all? Why not call all war "war", asymmetric or otheriwise, regular or otherwise, urban or otherwise?All your argument says is that "terrorism" is an opportunistic and slanderous description of the violence of the enemy. That is the only consistent identification of terrorism. As I mentioned earlier: terrorism is a word the rich use to justify killing the poor.

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Well now, that's just plain laughable. Look through my posts in this thread and pont out where I made that argument. You're starting to sound a lot like good old WILLOWTREE.

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Why is it laughable? It's a much more consistently applicable description than yours.I ask again: why do we introduce the emotionally-laden term "terrorism" when "war" will do just as well, or "terrorist" where "combatant" would do just as well?The choice to use such a term is rhetorical, and seeks to impugn the legitimacy of the person described. It is a propaganda term, that is all.

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Please point out where I said that.

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Here:

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So the difference between something like the bombings in Japan, Britain and Germany during WWII and the bombing at the King David Hotel is that the former were acts of a Nation State during war while the later was committed by a non-government

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The corllaries are clear: if you are rich enough to afford uniforms, tanks, and aircraft, nothing you do - no matter how heinous - will be regarded as terrorism. Your combatants will be treated as POW's.If you are not rich enough to afford uniforms, tanks and aircraft, your combatants will be described as terrorists, regardless of their heroism, self-sacrifice or discipline. They will also be treated as illegal combatants or saboteurs, and face torture and summary execution.Seeing as we cannot use "recognition" as a criteria as already demonstrated, and we cannot use the intent to achieve political ends (becuase this includes states), the only remaining criteria is the obvious: whether you are rich enough to look like a regular army.Therefore: "terrorism" is a word that the rich use to justify killing the poor. There are no other measures consistent to the uses to which the term is put.

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If you would like to define terrorism as "an opportunistic and slanderous description of the violence of the enemy", then fine. We will acknowledge that contracycle believes that is the definition of terrorism.

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Me and just about everyone who has ever fought in a war of national liberation. cf William Blum's book "Rogue State" in which he proposes the forumlation "a terrorist is a person with a bomb but no aircraft"; when I was about 15 I formulated mine to understand the South African Border War: "a terrorist is a soldier in an army too poor to buy tanks".Terrorism does not exist. Terrorism is a term like "sub-human": it's only purpose is to indicate the speakers disaproval of the subject. It has no objective identity, describes no consistent features or behaviours, and is nothing more than a piece of political rhetoric. That is what terrorism is - the boogeyman.

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When a political objective is desired, and there is no credible threat to one's security (in other words livelihood), yet one decides to use violence to change opinion to one's favor, that is terrorism no matter who the actor is. In a way it is almost by definition, as one is using fear in place of other valid alteratives.

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Thats a cogent structure but useless I fear. Do you really believe that people resort to violence when other methods exist? Not in their opinion, in my experience.Again, the ANC would have certainly made ther argument that peaceful alternatives did not exist, and that their constituency faced real and dire threat of death, but the NP mounted much the argument that you mount against extremism, saying that athere was no excuse for violence and this undermined their cause. The result was the NP saying the terrorist refuse to negotiate therefore we must use force, and the ANC saying the state refuses to negotiate and therefore we must use force.

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I believe your statement is laughable. Let the other readers judge.

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Yes, lets. After all, you clearly cannot provide ANY consistent criterion at all.

I think any definition that results in describing the Israeli state as non-terrorist is necessarily fatuously flawed.

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In the other thread, contracycle questioned DarkStar's use of a motive-based definition of terrorism. The example contracycle used was the destruction of infrastructure that caused civilian casualties as terrorist. IMO, it is not a terrorist act per se. It may be morally indefensible if it causes civilian casualties, but it is not in and of itself a terrorist act. OTOH, the deliberate targeting of civilian non-combatants as an objective IS terrorism. Hence, to take a few historical examples, the indescriminate firebombing of civilian population centers during WWII such as Tokyo and Dresden, or the bombing of Coventry, or the slaughter at Nanking, were demonstrably "terrorist", as they had as their sole justification and target the civilian populace of the respective victims.

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Its a functionally useless criterion. Why are the nuclear bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima not included in your list of attacks directed at civilian populations? Its easy to find apologists for these atrocities who make the argument that they were a necessary step to bringing Japan to the peace table asnd therefore produced a net saving of lives - how precisely do we discern the INTENT here? And can intent be discerned from anything other than self-reportage, which is necessarily subject to rationalisation?Couldn't the Chechnyan fighters at Beslan have also claimed that if their plan had worked, and Russia was deterred, there would also have been a net saving of lives? Or similarly, the attack on the twin towers?Intent is a useless measure. In fact I consider it dangerous because it is so easy to spin - it relies on speculation as to another persons state of mind, about as imprecise and unreliable a method as it is possible to have. And in the cintext of emotive words like "terrorist" being bandied about already, that cannot be considered valid at all.

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Did you read what I wrote? Where do you get anything about "saving lives"? My criteria is that terrorism is the deliberate targeting of civilian noncombatants. In both of the two incidents you cite here, there can be no question using my criteria that they constituted terrorist acts.

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Alright. What about Grozny and Falluja? In bath cases, the formal armies knew full when they were civlian areas, with many times more civilians than combatants, and yet they have used high explosive shells, artillery phosphorous rounds, and recon-by-fire. In both cases the formal armies argue - as does Israel in the West bank - that these civilian casualties are an unfortunate necessity for bringing the war as a whole to a close. At least, that is how they report their intent.By your criteria are these terrorist acts because they knowingly target civilians, even if there is some other nominal objective?A second issue arises in what constitutesd a combatant. In Falluja, the Us threw a cordon around the city and refused to allow any males between 18 and 40 at leave. If you were one of these peoplem, you would not have been allowed to leave - would you then seek out a weapon, just in case? If you do, you will instantly become a combatant in the eyes of the occupying forces. How do w determine the status of a person - the dead cannot testify in their own defence. And, further, what about someone who was conscripted - are they civilian or soldier? In short, what rigorous criteria an be used to separate combatants from non-combatants?That is what I dislike about the intent-to-target-civilians argument. I would prefer to go back to the definition that was current in the 70's and 80's, that terrorism is the use of violence as a form of political persuasion (as opposed naked territorial conquest). This at least has some objectively measurable standards, such as the arguments deployed, rather than relying on superficial descriptions of the victims as civilian or combatant.This message has been edited by contracycle, 11-24-2004 05:18 AM

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Based on this definition, much of modern war since 1914 has included acts of terrorism. I tend to think that terrorism should be defined as actions against civilians at a fair distance from the actual battlefield, if the idea of battlefield can even be defined. For a terrorist, any site anywhere involving anyone of "them" is fair game.

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A fair point, but of course that makes Israel a terrorist state without question. Becuase Israel argues that a Hamas leader in a coffee shop, or in a crowded street, is a valid target and too bad about the civilian casualties. Again I have no problem with this, but many people do.It's also dubious in the cas of Iraq, though, becuase formal armies can make anywhere they choose "a battlefield", as they have done to Falluja.

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Although there were allegations in the Grozny case that flattening the city was a deliberate attack on the civilian population (and hence terrorist), the situation with Fallujah is not analogous. In the latter there was no effort to destroy or kill noncombatants.

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And right there your argument fails. I don't care what rationalisation is givenb for attacking civilians, civilians were attacked. Furthermore, neither the citizens of Grozny nor Falluja nor Hue can experience these assaults as anything other than deliberate. Guns don't kill people, marine snipers kill people, whetehr or not they are civilians.An army that knowingly fights amid civilians cannot claim it killed those civilians accidentally. It can claim it had to do it, but it cannot claim it was an accident.

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The entire point of using intent as a basis for judgement is designed to remove the ambiguity and force "legitimate" states to confront their own uses of terror by making a clear distinction

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But there is no distinction, because there are no circumstances that they cannot resort to the intent defence. How can we assess the intent of an operation except by reportage and interpretation? And knowing that terrorism is a Bad Thing, nobody ever admits to it. What this analysis does is actually de facto legitmise all civilain killings by a formal army, becuase the only organisation with the power to take exception to the claim and do something about it is an opposing formal army. As in the case in Iraq at the moment, the western media will continue to spin Western operations as ones that accidentally kill civilians, and enemy actions as ones that deliberately kill civilians - even if there is no discernable difference in their methoids, and often, where the methods of the west are substantially worse (eg phsphorous artillery in a city, or in fact any use of the doctrine of overwhelming force in civilian areas).

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If you have a gun, you're a combatant. Doesn't matter in the least why you have it. Involuntary conscripts may or may not have the opportunity to throw down their weapons and surrender. If they do, the worst that can happen is they're interned until their true status is determined.

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Not if you are sniped. Not if you are bombed by an F-18. By the way, "involuntary consript" is redundant.

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If they don't, doesn't that speak more to the detriment of those who forced them into that situation than it does to those who merely take the fact that they are armed at face value?

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I simply don't care to whose detriment it speaks becuase my objective is to minimse loss of life, not to moralise murder.

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No one can realistically be expected to stop in the middle of a battle and ask whether the guy with the rifle really wants to be there.

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Quite so. That is why I am wholly against the deploying of combat troops into civilian areas. If you recognise this to be true, then sending soldiers into such areas is explicit acceptance that they will necessarily kill non-combatants or involuntary combatants in the course of that opeartion. In which case: you are culpable fopr doing so, because you knew exactly what the concsequences of that action would be.

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However, the fundamental problem with that definition remains: there is no way to distinguish between "legitimate" guerrilla groups or insurgents and terrorists.

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Of course. The fact that there IS a difference is exactly what I dispute.

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By this definition, the American revolutionaries were terrorists.

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Yes of course. Why is that wrong?

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It also completely absolves nation states from acknowledging and hopefully refraining from use of force against enemy (however that is defined) civilians as a legitimate tool of war. It legitimizes (or at least fails to condemn) such government-sponsored actions as the Salvadoran death squads, the use of carpet bombing on civilian areas by the 8th Air Force, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which you yourself referenced, the burning of dozens of German villages by the Romans following the Teutoburgwald massacre, etc etc etc.

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All of which is quite true. Not least of which is becuase I recognise that in a fully serious, to-the-death war, the very idea of a civilian will vanish. Look at the second world war - the totalo war in wehich every sector of society was mobilised toward combat operations, whether that be Rosie the Riverter or actual front-line combatants. And no state in such a circumstance would ever even think twice about flattening whole cities full of civilians - becuase this is total war, and all civilian endeavours support the war effort directly or indirectly. War is hell, so what else is new?But that is NOT an excuse to justify the butchery in Falluja, or Grozny, or Hue, in which the perpetrating state is not fighting total war, and claims hypocrtitically to be trying not to kill civilians while shooting weapons gauranteed to kill civilians into civilian areas. States enagged in total war will happilly tell you they killed as many enemy "civilians" as they could and would do so again.Once again the net result is: a rich country with tanks and planes will kill civilians and claim that it was an accident, when not inntotal war, or take pride in it when it is total war. It will also describe any action by a poor enemy that results in a civilian death as illegitimate terrorism. The only time it cannot make tis analysis stick is when the enemy is sufficiently rich and powerful to produce its own propaganda, but then both sides resort to dehumanisaing the enemy completely.