JohnBarleycorn wrote:....
As an historian, the question I would ask would be......
The bombing of the twin towers,
The bombing of Pearl Harbour
The bombing of Dresden
The atomic bombs dropped on Japan
The bombing of Coventry or Rotterdam
What was the difference ?
As I see it, bombings committed by the good guys are just unpleasant aspects of war, but bombings committed by the bad guys are criminal or terrorist acts.
You can argue it any way you like, but the cold, hard truth is that innocent people die. Countries, organisations, individuals, fight with whatever they have to hand. Lancaster bombers, suicide bombers.....they all further the aims of the individual or country, using civilians as their targets.
I seem to remember one million Iraqi civillians, mostly children, died in the 1990's, as a result of UN sanctions. A million, a thousand......the number isn't important.......they died in 'our' name.
So who are the terrorists ?
Unfortunately history is not so black and white.
1. You cannot judge all countries equally in saying 'bombings are bad'. Every country is at a different stage of development and economic prosperity, and lumping all bombings done by all countries (or even one country over many years) is not an accurate way to judge a situation. Would you have been against the bombing of Hitler? What if you could have bombed Hitler and only killed him and his close generals?
2. Intention is very important. If the US didn't specifically care about killing as few citizens as possible, why would the military even bother developing smart bombs, which have a very high accuracy and low collateral damage? Why send in a strike team to kill terrorist targets when they could just bomb the crap out of an area? In fact, most first-world countries go out of their way to prevent civilian deaths in war. Most underdeveloped countries (led by dictators or terrorists) go out of their way to cause as many civilian casualties as possible. You don't see the difference?
3. (Unfortunately) we do not currently live in a pacifist utopia. One man with a machine gun could kill an entire country of pacifists. It's simply not a legitimate way for everyone to live. So how do you propose we discourage evil and encourage good? Yes many civilians died in Iraq during the sanctions, but how else would you have persuaded Saddam to stop killing his people and remove himself from power? In fact, the sanctions didn't work and the US had to end up going in there by force in order to remove him. Good or bad idea? I don't really know, but I DO know that pacifism does not make the world a better place, unless everyone else agrees to be a pacifist as well.
You ask who the terrorists are, but I am wondering if you believe you know the answer. A terrorist is someone who purposely causes the deaths of innocents, while a soldier is someone who goes out of his way to only kill combatants. This is a clear boundary.
And before this argument goes into the basis of personal belief, I
personally am against violence and war, and did not vote for any of the violent actions currently in progress (unless you count paying taxes as a form of support, in which case we are all murderers).
Im sure at least 15 randoms loosely connected with Bin Laden were probably knocked off on the way in, Im glad he cant plot anymore but Im not pleased for anyones death, suffering or even how twisted their mind and existance must have been to mastermind something so fucked up as 9/11