[Dan Halberstein]

Originally posted by Robert J. Clawson:

As I have said previously, the response by bombing is also barbaric. Strategic bombing is designed to break the will of the populace by killing it. I ask the simple question, how often does bombing fulfill its purpose?

Originally posted by Janet Kenny:

As far as I am concerned anybody who for any reason at all uses explosives on humans is a terrorist. Anyone who defends them is a sympathiser and supporter of terrorists. The scale is immaterial.
Nothing in history should move us if this can't.

I know that's not a very useful intervention.

Originally posted by Lo:

If your reasoning is correct, Janet, and a valid definition of "terrorist" then Nazi Germany was not a terrorist organization for their barbaric and long-lasting treatment of Jews, Gays, Gypsies, etc etc and the United States Army was a terrorist organization for putting an end to WWII by the sheer act of dropping 2 bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a few short minutes and anything and everything which came before that painful and agonized act was as immaterial as your "scale."

And so we wade into the historical debate over strategic bombing - despite the fact that Israel is not engaged in it, contrary to RJ's point.

First, an opinion of my own: Strategic bombing -- the purposeful "carpet bombing" of civilian populations, in which the concentrated civilian population and its infrastructureis the main target -- is difficult if not impossible to defend. So is a country if everybody else is engaging in strategic bombing except you. Even British military men in the midst of World War II logged very low opinions of the bombing of German cities. It was worse in Japan, where wood was the predominant building material... and where U.S. "strategists" intentionally employed a specifically high-incendiary explosive to create firestorms. A quarter million may have died in the bombing of Tokyo, more than in both atomic bombings.

Since then, aerial bombardment has been used in many theatres of war, some of it in a strategic bombing campaign, some of it not.

RJ correctly identifies "Strategic bombing is designed to break the will of the populace by killing it." There's a good argument here that strategic bombing is essentially a terrorist act (though these are not RJ's words. He prefers "lunacy".)

Janet generalizes the argument to "anyone who uses explosives on human beings."

Lo returns to the strategic bombing theme (in part) within her post, with an opinion regarding the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

None of these points of view except Janet's bear on the current situation in Lebanon.

I realize this could be either purposeful stretching of the definition, unfamiliarity with the definition, or a typo -- but Israel is not, contrary to what you see on Al Jazeera (or sometimes, for that matter, CNN), carpet-bombing the entirety of Lebanon "into rubble."

Damage estimates are still in the low billions. Deaths are still in the hundreds. Israel's bombing, while still producing civilian casualties, which are still a horrific impact of war, is not a "total war" bombing intended to wipe out the population. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing

The day before yesterday marked the 61st anniversary of Hiroshima, may we never witness its likes again. As Lo points out, it is not a decided matter that Hiroshima was not necessary; and from necessity, one can very quickly go to justification, if we believe that ought implies can, or the logical negative formulation (i.e., it is meaningless to say we "should not," when we "must".) And the scale of that horror, just one of many, many such horrors during WWII, dwarfs the entirety of the Israeli campaign.

For RJ and Lo - in whose arguments "scale" features prominently - I humbly submit that although a debate on the merits of strategic bombing bears on a number of conflicts including and since WWII, it is only tangentially related to this discussion, since it is not a feature of the current conflict. The Israelis restrain themselves from it, and Hezbollah attempts it but cannot really pull it off.

For Janet, however, any use of explosives against a human being is a terrorist, and anyone who disagrees with her position (i.e., "defends them,") is a supporter of and sympathizer with terrorists. This crafty if transparent gambit is evidently meant to close the matter. I do not think it does, as far as reason goes.

As Lo points out, the argument breaks down for any except an "explosives pacifist." Evidently bullets (except explosive-point) are very good ways of killing people, whether or not they are lined up unarmed in front of a mass grave they have been forced to dig, and do not constitute terrorism. Pushing a wheelchair-bound man off a ship is a very good way to kill him, and does not qualify as terrorism. I'm not certain if the 9/11 attacks were terrorism by this definition, since Jet Fuel's primary hazard is flammability (although ramming it at high speed into a building also causes an explosion.)

Or perhaps Janet's argument is that use of explosives against humans is one of a number of ways one can be marked as a terrorist, with the others unspecified. This would negate the preceding paragraph, as well as some of Lo's objections. It does leave unanswered the question (as Lo also notes,) of what else we consider terrorism.

In the extreme, the argument replaces the moral argument, which has some value, with an argument from chemical properties. We have heard a recent press mantra that "you cannot fight a war against a method (terrorism.)" How much less can you fight a war, moral or physical, against a chemical property?

But let's allow that use of explosives against humans has a moral component, which makes of it a terrorist tactic, regardless of the context and reason for its use. Since we are arguing specifically against terrorism, not war, (although I'll allow that "war" can easily be renamed "terrorism," thereby obviating any distinction in our discussion of the phenomena, despite any distinction in the things themselves,) that moral component cannot simply be that explosives kill people. After all, bullets do, blades do, etc.

For use of explosives against people to be terrorism whereas bullets are not, I have to infer that the argument rests on unspokens - that the explosives are being used in a more indiscrimate way than bullets would be.

Taking this at face value, it is an elegant argument for a full-scale Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon -- and a very special ground invasion in which Israel refrains from use of shells, and relies solely on un-explosive projectiles. I am not aware of any group or nation which achieves its objectives in this manner in the modern age, unless we count the Yanomamo and similar groups who have not acquainted themselves yet with explosives. Would this be a more discriminating form of warfare among modern nation states? Were it ever tried, we may be able to test the theory. I do not believe it would be. It would certainly involve herculean restraint on the part of one belligerant, perhaps a level of restraint no military can morally exercise, if it indeed takes seriously its moral obligation to defend a nation.

I know all of this is very dry, and very removed from what I understand to be the more moral mode of analysis consisting of weeping and gnashing of teeth.

But the terrible, unconscionable truth remains: Israel's armed forces -- as opposed to the U.S. and Britain during WWII, Hezbollah, and Syria, to name a few --do not intentionally target civilians. Israel's armed forces make every effort to minimize civilian casualties, both Israeli and Lebanese. The opposite is true of Hezbollah.

Terrorism, despite Mark G's protestations to the contrary, does have a definition, as abused as it may be in the terminology bandied about today. It is the deliberate murder of civilians in order to cause fear. Elsewhere it would be an interesting debate: were Tokyo, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki "justified terrorism," terrorism, full stop, or not terrorism... but terrorism only describes the behavior of one side of the present conflict in Lebanon, Hezbollah.

Israel is not engaged in the deliberate murder of civilians in order to cause fear, and Hezbollah is.

(In deference to Lo, this might not make the Nazis terrorists, since terror was just a side effect of genocide. But they would still be genocidal, which trumps terrorist. By the same token, Hezbollah would commit genocide, given the means, but is constrained at present to terrorism, since the necessary transfer of means, from Syria or Iran, has not yet been made.)

Search as we may for a sufficiently broad argument to draw an equivalency between Israel and Hezbollah, the equivalency does not exist. Search as we may for a sufficiently broad definition to make everybody a terrorist, everybody is not a terrorist. The word exists (as do all words) to delineate meaning; obfuscation of the word is a temporary fix to make the phenomenon it signifies go away, in the mind of the obfuscator. But since the phenomenon still exists, this will just lead to the creation of another word to signify the phenomenon.

The U.S. and France have made a proposal to end this conflict, and Lebanon has countered (predictably arguing that her sovereignty requires Lebanese troops stand between Israel and Hezbollah, despite earlier claims that her sovereignty did not extent to Lebanon's south.) God willing, one way or another, both Israel's actions against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hezbollah's actions against the people of Israel, will end.

But as much as we may hope for these inseparable conditions to pertain, we still do ourselves a disservice when we stretch words and concepts beyond their breaking points in support of our arguments. Again, we can destroy the distinct meaning of words to promote an indistinct analysis, but reality dictates our analyses be as distinct as possible; it is quite literally, a deadly serious exercise. So the destruction of distinct words will only yield a temporary respite from this rigor.

If we are really averse to specificity, not the words used to express specificity, we will find our efforts in promotion of vagueness frustrated time and again.

Dan


[This message has been edited by Dan Halberstein (edited August 08, 2006).]