What exactly is the Difference?
Allow me to pose a question here. It may be rhetorical, but perhaps there is an answer.Example #1:
Just after sunrise, a nondescript van pulls slowly up to the front gate of a small appartment complex. In 12 units, there are a total of 44 people. Men about to go to work, children getting ready for school, some elderly retired folks. The driver of the van guns the engine and drives through the gate. A security guard fires a few rounds at the windshield, but it's all just too fast and too chaotic. The van blows a tire as it hits the broad stairs at the main enterance, but it's momentum carries it up the stairs and through the door. For a brief moment, nothing happens. Then, in an enormous blast, five hundred pounds of high explosives detonate, shattering the morning quiet and collapsing the front of the building. Fourteen people are killed outright. Another eleven will die of their injuries or be found dead in the rubble. All are injured, traumatized, heartbroken with their losses and physically broken by the pain.
Example #2:
Just after sunrise, in the same small appartment building. Sixteen thousand feet above, an F-16 orbits, the pilot inputting target coordinates into the Weapons/Fire Control System. A suspected terrorist operator is in a house just behind the appartments. Ground control has determined that they can accomplish the mission safely. The pilot releases a 500 pound JDAM precision guided bomb. No one can say why - maybe the coordinates were wrong, maybe one of the chips in the electronics was faulty, maybe it was nothing more than a wayward gust of wind - but the bomb overshoots its target and punches through the main enterance to the appartments. Fourteen people are killed outright. Another eleven will die of their injuries or be found dead in the rubble. All are injured, traumatized, heartbroken with their losses and physically broken by the pain.
Now to the question. Why is example #1 terrorism? Or more importantly, why is example #2 NOT terrorism? How can there be any difference?
Terrorists are not identified by color, religion or on who's behalf they are killing innocents. Terrorists are the people who commit terrorism. Nothing more, nothing less...
posted by mikey @ 11:39 AM
5 Comments:
The act in itself has the same effect, a building was destroyed and people were killed. The difference is would be motive. The fighter pilot was dropping a bomb on a "supposed terrorist" and something went wrong. The person in the van had other intentions such as killing people where they lived. But the problem isn't in the question itself. The problem is how many accidents can happen before we do more damage than the terrorists? I didn't include the insurgents since that's a totally different fight oh and by the way we aren't fighting terrorists in Iraq (and yes I know I am kinda off topic, but...). We have already been pressed to that point and refuse to change course, strategy, tactics or anything else in this supposed war on terrorism. How can we even consider victory when we are already defeated due to our lack of knowing what battles to fight or whom to engage?
I don't buy it. The motive is the same - to kill people. Blowing up a house that MIGHT contain a suspected terrorist just isn't that great a leap in motivational purity. And if the F-16 pilot and those who sent him are to be absolved in this case because they bombed the appartment building "accidently", let's suppose the suicide bomber in the van got confused about the target and hit the wrong building. Then is he to be absolved of wrongdoing or terrorism because he killed those specific people "accidently"?
I think you are being disingenuous when you make a comment like that. I a war mistakes will happen. I won't use the Iraq debacle as an scenario since that is a war based upon lie after lie. But in a war where people have engaged in lawful fighting, accidents will happen, it's just the nature of war. But the difference between murdering people and accidentally killing someone are different in my mind and maybe that's where we differ. Your question posed is there a difference and I say yes. If a soldier/jet/tank/implement of destruction was meant to target innocent civilians, and then yes that would be an act of terrorism. When your goal is to attack civilians not accidentally kill them then you are a terrorist.
From wiki:
Terrorism is a term used to describe acts (or threats) of violence committed against civilians by groups or persons for political, nationalist, or religious goals. As a type of unconventional warfare, terrorism means to weaken or supplant existing political landscapes through capitulation, acquiescence, or radicalization, as opposed to subversion or direct military action.
However, if you asked me if what we are doing in Iraq would be considered terrorism, I might just say yes.
Not disingenuous at all. Thank you for the definition. Now go back and read it. The purpose of terrorism is not to kill people or break stuff. The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize. It can honestly be said that the victims of terrorism "are collateral damage". Bin Laden didn't kill 3000 Americans because he hated New Yorkers. He killed THEM to terrify US into abandoning our identity. It worked.
Americans drop aerial bombs in densely populated Iraqi neighborhoods not to kill "suspected terrorists". Come on, one guy here or there, we've got 140,000 troops, that's just not the point. In that same sense they are "collateral damage". The idea is a kind of collective punishment, an attempt to make everyday Iraqi citizens afraid to help the insurgents because the insurgents can be bomb magnets. You've got to be willing to look at this dispassionately. The American military isn't stupid, they know exactly what they are doing. And what they are doing, I believe, included terrorism...
Well, in either case,terrorism is supposed to instill fear.Whether it is by words or actual acts. If anyone believes we,(The U.S.), in in Iraq for anything other that the oil, you are disillusioned. After all, what sense does it make to go commit to war for what a country potentially might have, or what they may be capable of if they get the knowledge of how to make something that may hurt us? When there was never any proof..besides, do people feel they are being "liberated" by being bombed?
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