Okay, first off I'm going to say that I KNOW, CONCEDE, REFUSE TO IGNORE
that the US is responsible for civilian deaths through our involvement
with other countries, in their wars or helping with rebels to overthrow
governments and so on. And without knowing any figures I would easily
believe that more than 50,000 civilians have been killed over the years,
again directly through our involvement within other nations. I will not
trivialize these deaths by calling them collateral deaths or whatever
term may apply.
BUT
How many of the people killed this week had ANYTHING to do with any
deaths in those other countries? Zero. Even from the 100 people in the
Pentagon, unless they say that a certain person was a member of CIA
training teams....
Was this attack aimed at specifically harming our government? (Again not
trying to justify our actions in other countries; it's a valid
question).
This was a large scale attack that rivals, exceeds, any war-time attack.
It is terrorism but it is also war. People around the world should be
glad that we are making statements to the effect that we are going to
wipe out terrorism. We aren't saying we are replacing government, or
wiping out religions.
Kevin Tarr
In a message dated 9/14/01 2:51:00 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Jeroen wrote:
>> In the case of a
>> terrorist attack, we will be quite able to deal with it without
dragging
>> NATO into it.
Dan wrote:
> The government of the Neatherlands could take on the army of
Afganastan
> and/or Iraq. Wow, I didn't know it was such an elite force. >>
No, the point Jeroen keeps making is that government-sponsored terrorism
is
not war. He keeps repeating this in various ways without actually using
those words.
So we have the simple question: Should government-sponsored terrorism
against
a sovereign nation be considered an act of war?
I would agree with the statement, but considering that the United States
has,
at various times in it's history sponsored and supported internal
guerilla
and revolutionary forces against their reigning governments and has not
considered it war, he may have a point.
Jon
