The war on terror, the terror of war

[drcruel.livejournal.com]

Terror. Terrorism. Terrorists. The right has done an amazing job of, inexorably and exclusively, linking these words with evil, bearded, Muslim men. It is certainly true that, in recent history, a great deal of terror has been wrought by evil, bearded Muslim men, but the great mistake of fomenters has ever been simplification. Terror is a tactic, not an opponent, and it has been used for many years, by many groups and organizations we don’t care to think of as evil, including us.

The greatest act of terrorism in history was committed on August 6, 1945, when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. In a blinding flash of violence, we committed murder on an unprecedented scale, killing some 75,000 people instantly and another 75,000 or so through after-effects. The ones who died quickly, instead of suffering through radiation poisoning, were the lucky ones. 75,000 dead instantly, 75,000 tortured to death over the next 2 months. It is an atrocity of unimaginable scale, and it was done to terrorize the Japanese. A week or so later we committed a similar massacre of civilians at Nagasaki. There is credible evidence that we had rebuffed Japanese attempts to surrender in order to drop the second atomic bomb, this time to terrorize the Soviets.

Nor was this the first such Allied slaughter of civilians. American soldiers had firebombed many cities in Japan and Germany that had no military capability in a deliberate effort to demoralize the civilian population of our enemies. To the dead, and to those that mourn them, it has never made a difference whether or not the people who killed their families were wearing uniforms. We were at war and, as General Sherman said, “War is all Hell.” He should know. His rampage through the south was a deliberate effort to starve out the Confederacy. It must truly be terrifying to watch your farm burn to the ground and wonder if you will be able to feed your children. And our tactics haven’t changed much over the years; U.S. planes dropped pictures of U.S. soldiers eating lunch on piles of severed heads during our involvement in the Vietnam War, and we proudly spoke of 1000lb bombs, psychological warfare and “shock and awe” campaigns during our invasion of Iraq. We want our enemies to be afraid. Every soldier wants his enemies to fear him.

The great mistake we make when we insist on labeling our enemies as terrorists is that it is a deliberate attempt to misunderstand them. They don’t have grievances, the legitimacy of which can be debated-they hate us for our freedoms. They don’t have political goals, the expediency of which can be questioned-they want to establish a caliphate. They are not soldiers, men and women who are willing to die for a cause in which they believe-they are terrorists. They are not men and women who fight for principles, the merits of which can be discussed-they are spineless, irrational cowards, durka durka Mohammed jihad.

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Bill Maher lost his job amidst a firestorm of criticism for stating that the 9/11 hijackers had guts. The comment was ill-advised and ill-timed, but it was also completely accurate; it is as though we are so terrified of seeing our enemies as human beings that we must demonize them at every possible turn. George W. Bush referred to our “War on Terror” as a war against “Evil,” a “Battle for the soul of civilization,” a war against “Islamic extremism,” and a war against “Satan.”

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, we are not fighting a war against any of these nebulous concepts. Nor are we fighting a war against insane, deluded cowards. We are fighting a war against men and women who are using terror as a tactic for the same reason we used terror as a tactic in World War II and Vietnam: they don’t have the manpower to invade, conquer and occupy. We’re fighting people, not demons-people who think it’s ridiculous that we insist they play by Marcus of Queensbury rules when we have unmanned Predator drones and they have rocks. We’re fighting people who have more in common with IRA soldiers or Basque separatists than with coal-eyed fanatics-and we’re losing. We will not win this war until we understand our enemy, and we will not understand our enemy until we stop being so terrified to put aside some of our overblown rhetoric and understand him.

Comments

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

The greatest act of terrorism in history was committed on August 6, 1945, when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan.

I'm glad you got this out of the way early so I could ignore the rest of this post without fearing I'd miss something.

[dreadfulpenny81.livejournal.com]

Thank you! Agreed.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

Seconded.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Eh, gives me a chance to do a little intellectual exercise......

[anadinboy.livejournal.com]

lol if this was youtube id give u a thumbs up

[qnetter]

the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes.

And dropping the bomb on Hiroshima specifically to induce surrender was not this in what way?

Are you having difficulty separating the denotative nature of an accurate definition from the connotative aspect of your need to use the word only with a sense of moral outrage?

[devil-ad-vocate.livejournal.com]

ditto.

[ccr1138.livejournal.com]

Agreed.

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

Oh my god yes.

And yet I did finish. Go figure.

[mikeyxw.livejournal.com]

Agreed. She deserves thanks for failing both clearly and early.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

I agree that they have grievances. I don't agree, however, that they have the right to usurp those grievances for their own desires. Sure, some Taliban don't like, say for instance, the Palestinian situation. Ok... so what? Me neither. Does that give me a right to go blow up the local police station? No, it doesn't. It is really a very simple principle, and very simple principles are pretty much forgotten. "Having a grievance" is nice. Adopting grievances is just silly, as if we can imbue ourselves with mortal authority because, say, I don't like American troops in Saudi Arabia. Well no shit, but does that give you a right to run about and attack Spain? The US? Iraqis? Pashtuns? Pakistanis?

Fundamentally, the conflict is about whether or not we allow self-anointed saviors and representatives to abscond with other people's grievances and blow yet-other unrelated people to hell because they're angry.

Good for you, you're angry. Whoop-de-doo. Join the club.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The Taliban were a bunch of students who felt they had a chance to end the Afghan Civil War. Hell of it is that the Iranians disliked them as much as we did and yet they were still within a hair's breadth of crushing the Northern Alliance for good. All this of course ignores that the Allies neither initiated terror bombing nor were they responsible for the sustained atrocities of say, the six-week barbarian incidents at Nanking, they never used poison gas the way Fascist Italy did, nor did even the USSR institute genocide as official state policy the way both Germany and Japan did.

And of course Hitler began strategic bombing at Guernica in '36, Japan improved it at Chunking in '38 and it was a part of WWII since Warsaw in '39.

[drcruel.livejournal.com]

Nobody said it was ok to blow up police stations or anything else. My point was that these are people using terror as one of their tactics and it is self-serving and self-defeating to call them "terrorists" and stop there.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

If Hiroshima and Nagasaki count as terrorism then surely one must also include things like the Rape of Nanking and the Holocaust and the Armenian Deportation and the Blitz, the Bombings of Rotterdam and of course the Great Terror of the 1780s and the Greater Terror under the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, especially Lenin and Stalin.

And anyone who believes the Allies lacked manpower to invade, conquer, and occupy the Axis nations in World War II very obviously neglected the entirety of the Axis-Soviet War, where the USSR beat the Nazis in one of the most overwhelming victories in history.

And to claim that the Axis Powers were defenseless is also a bald-faced lie. It should be noted that by the time the Allies were using strategic bombing on the wide scale the Germans, Japanese, and Italians had been using it for many years, Japan and Germany both before the Second World War itself began. They also had conquered vast areas far exceeding any other militaries in world history and to put it crudely beat the Allies senseless early in the war.

Hitler's motivation in bombing Rotterdam and Warsaw and the Japanese motivation at Chunking were no different than this. For that matter it is indisputable that Sherman's actions both shortened the war and preserved the Federal Union for industrial capitalism as opposed to slave oligarchy.

For that matter if one uses the term terror to refer to things like strategic bombing, it is technically accurate but the proper definition of a terrorist is a non-state military. Armies are not terrorism by virtue of having a recognized state to legitimize them.

The delightful consequence of those two words "recognized state" makes the entire 4 years of the Civil War the most sustained terrorist incident in US history.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

For that matter assumption that the Bomb was used to terrorize the Soviets indicates one neither understands the USSR of the time (already working on designing its own bomb and with plenty of spies all over the Manhattan Project), nor Imperial Japan (which pioneered suicide attacks as a military tactic in use of things like kamikazis, banzai charges, bakka bombs and the like), nor World War II itself where mass targeting of civilians once initiated by the Axis became as ordinary as use of chemical weapons was in World War I.

There is no moral equivalence in the horrors suffered by the Axis and the Allies in World War II. It was no moral crusade but the people of Dresden were right next to a death camp and Japan of course instituted massacres and human experimentation as ordinary aspects of war as much as Germany did.

Were the bombings evil? Yes. Did they end up saving both Allied and Axis lives? Anyone looking at the way Japan fought the war and looking at how the IJA and IJN would have reacted to an invasion of Japanese soil itself would have to argue yes.

+10000

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

(I love it when other people do the heavy lifting, lol. )

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

unprecedented scale

LOL. Hardly.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Indeed. Japan alone killed some 250,000 Chinese in six weeks of murder, rape, and looting at Nanking. Germany, of course, had such minor incidents as the complete wiping out of Lidice and things like the Babi Yar Massacre to its toll.

In fact by comparison with the other mass slaughters of the war the two atomic bombings were pussies.

[http://users.livejournal.com/-wanderer-/]

I agree with you insofar as I think that it hurts a side to make caricatures of their enemies.

[dwer.livejournal.com]

dehumanization of the enemy is pretty standard.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Except his post attributes Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both of which were acts of war by armies backed by recognized states, as the largest acts of terrorism in history. If two bombings are terrorism, then the Rape of Nanking exceeds the death toll of both bombings, which he attributes to about 280,000 deaths in the *mid range* estimates.

For that matter the USSR would also have been the greatest victim of terrorism of the European War, along with China in Asia.....

[anadinboy.livejournal.com]

the ira and basque are even worse, on the grounds they could live perfectly normal lives with no violence if they so choose.
You know you dont get serial killers in northern ireland, its because anyone with that turn of mind can join a 'cause' and slaughter ppl that way.

[usekh.livejournal.com]

And the IRA got untold support from various US citizens including at least one prominent republican during that time

[rasilio.livejournal.com]

In addition to the issues with your post mentioned by others I'll bring up a few more.

1) World War 2 ended 65 years ago, In the intervening 65 years there has been a massive moral shift in what is considered acceptable behavior in warfare. You simply cannot apply today's morality to acts which occurred that long ago.

2) Given the extent that the US went to in minimizing civilian casualties during both Iraq wars it is clear that "Shock and Awe" refer to the effect it was intended to have on the Iraqi military and political leadership, not the Iraqi people. At no point in the last 50 years has the US military targeted civilians specifically. Yes we've killed more than our fair share of them, sometimes in rogue acts by individual soldiers and other times by mistake or as collateral damage but we have not targeted civilians for the terror purpose.

That is the difference between the armies of the nation states (even Russia counts in here for the most part) and terrorists.

Armies do not target civilians, they target enemies, but they won't hesitate to shoot if the enemy hides in and among civilians. Terrorists target civilians who are incapable of defending themselves.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

The problem with this story is that since WWII, civilian casualties in war have become 90 percent of deaths associated with war, whereas before, it was far less. We have a fantasy-idea that somehow our "pin-point" weaponry has reduced civilian casualties. It hasn't. The idea that we have better targeting that somehow mitigates or reduces civilian casualties is a nice story, but doesn't bear out in reality.

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

"There is credible evidence that we had rebuffed Japanese attempts to surrender in order to drop the second atomic bomb, this time to terrorize the Soviets."

[citation needed]

[devil-ad-vocate.livejournal.com]

I believe citation will not be forthcoming.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

It used to be pretty standard on all sides of war to target civilian centers. War was basically about who could horrify the enemy enough for the enemy to surrender. We only learned later that the PR effect of not killing civilians was so effective in international diplomacy (fight on our side guys!) and in easily overthrowing despotic governments.

The thing is, we moved on. Most of the world moved on. You know we used to have slaves too. We moved on from that too, and it means we can now condemn that practice when people today do it. There's all sorts of horrible things humans have done from history that we no longer do and feel its morally right to not do and can now state that others should also not do it. Just like with war. We can now condemn other people who target civilians because we learned our lesson and no longer do it, and agree with most civilized nations to not do it(a lesson we cloak in morality).

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn't, but one could easily argue Lidice, Nanking, Chunking, Rotterdam, and the Blitz did. And let's not forget some basic facts about Downfall had it happened.

First, the strategic plan was obvious to both sides, like at Kursk. The Soviets were able to deal one of the first big asskicking of the Germans of Soviet devising there. In this case some end-of-the-war tactics are going to be rather more effective, where Japan was also planning to use gas, biological warfare, and the same banzai charge tactics with millions instead of thousands charging.

Second, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria already devastated Japanese power and I'm pretty sure Stalin would have relished providing the coda to Khalkin Ghol. I'm also sure that Japan as a second Korea writ large would have been no good for anyone, especially the Ainu.

It should be noted as well that in the case of the Allies even the USSR was far more limited in its slaughters than the Germans were. Germans killed everybody, while Soviet actions were intended either to prevent another resurgence of Polish nationalism of the sort instrumental in the defeat of the Tsars or alternately reprisal for collaboration during a total war.

Actually Sherman's campaign 1) was less devastating than the Carolinas Campaign and 2) he issued orders softer than those given in the war of 1914-18, let alone WWII. But over 150 years of the losing side writing the history has blackened his name unfairly.

Not to mention that tiny little militia known as the Soviet Army, which was responsible for defeating 77% of the German army and all of its best troops.

Not to mention 9/11 was twenty guys with boxcutters pulling a kamikazi attack on banking centers.

[usekh.livejournal.com]

Curious, how about say Palestinian suicide bombings aimed at security forces, is that terrorism? or the Beirut barracks bombings?

Also what the 9/11 hijackers did was abhorrent by any civilised standards. But yeah it takes guts to sacrifice your life for a cause. No matter how disgusting your cause may be.