Redefining terrorism

I'm often reminded by people smarter than me that terrorists are those who deliberately target civilians, the implication being that armies which "accidentally" kill hundreds, even thousands, of civilians in search of "legitimate" military targets cannot, by definition, be labeled terrorist organizations.

I've argued to the contrary that any country using overwhelming military force to bludgeon a far weaker country into submission, killing lots of "innocent" civilians in the process, is equally guilty of terrorism.  So maybe it's time to redefine the word.

Let's use the Iraq War as an example.  More specifically, let's look at the war through the eyes of epidemiologist, Les Roberts, who in 2000 correctly estimated that the civilian death toll in the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was not 50,000, but a "staggering" 1.7 million.  The same sampling techniques --what Roberts called "conflict epidemiology"-- were applied to Kosovo, Darfur, and Sierra Leone, even retroactively to wars long past, like Vietnam. 

Roberts' samplings and the civilian casualty estimates they yield have been widely accepted around the world, just about everywhere, in fact.

Everywhere, that is, except in Iraq.  

In 2004, Roberts traveled to Iraq, did his surveys, crunched the numbers, and concluded that in the first 18 months after the invasion, the Iraqi death toll was 100,000, a number which far exceeded the Iraq Body Count's 19,000.  A subsequent survey in 2006 raised the number of Iraqi deaths to 655,000.  A World Health Organization survey done at the same time came up with 397,000 Iraqi dead. 

Of course the Bush administration and other war backers have dismissed such numbers as "bunk".  Or propaganda.  Roberts, you see, admitted that he had opposed the American invasion of Iraq. 

Whatever the precise number --Roberts' "confidence level" ranges from 393,000 to 943,000 Iraqi dead-- it's probable that the American invasion of Iraq has been responsible for hundreds of thousands of primarily civilian deaths. 

The terrorist attacks in 2001 killed fewer than 3000 innocent American civilians.

In terms of the sheer number of civilians killed by the American military through the indiscriminate use of technologically superior force, including so-called "smart bombs", America meets my definition of a "terrorist" nation. 

America, of course, has a long history of terrorizing weaker countries.  It can be argued --in fact it has been argued-- that the secret bombing of Cambodia by Nixon and Kissinger led directly to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the slaughter of a million Cambodians.  The same two --Nixon and Kissinger-- approved the assassination of Chilean President Salvador Allende which led to Pinochet's reign of "disappearing" thousands of those he deemed a threat to his rule. 

And throughout Central America, America has long had its bloody hand in coups, rebellions, death squads, and the brutal suppression of leftist threats to American economic interests.  Who knows how many innocent civilians died as a result?

I'm no defender of terrorist tactics.  But I'm convinced that the strong as well as the weak are culpable in the slaughter of innocent civilians. 

Comments

[Craig]

OK, let's parse.

1. Were Hiroshima and Nagasaki acts of terrorism? Was Truman a war criminal? The intent of the bombings was to end the war although there is no question that Truman knew that the bombings would kill thousands of civilians. Also, Japan was not, arguably, a weaker nation.

2. How about the Dresden fire bombings? Was FDR a war criminal? Again, the intent was to end the war, but lots of German civilians died. And again, Germany was not, at least at the beginning of WWII, the weaker nation.

3. If Barack Obama next year has actionable intelligence that Osama Bin Laden is in a particular house in Pakistan and Obama orders a drone to drop a bomb on the house and if it turns out later that a couple of children were killed along with OBL, would Obama be a war criminal?

4. If, during any war, a soldier comes under fire from a house and retaliates by firing a mortar at the house and later finds out that several children, along with the enemy soldier, were killed in the house, did that soldier commit an act of terrorism? Is he a war criminal?

Unless you are prepared to say no war, not ever, under any circumstances, moral questions like these will always arise during wars. And people will have different answers to the questions I posed above.

For the record, my answers are Probably, Probably, No, No. What are yours?

By the way, it's not about numbers; it's about intent. Lt. Calley "only" murdered a few dozen villagers at My Lai, but he intended to; Calley, therefore, was, unquestionably, a war criminal.

[Terry]

I agree on numbers 1 and 2. My answers to 3 and 4 would be yes and yes.

I say that because we shouldn't be fighting a "war" to track down the terrorists responsible for 9/11. In fact we shouldn't be waging any illegal and/or unnecessary wars. Most wars are unnecesary. In that sense I am a true pacifist.

But I'm not much interested in legalisms, who could realistically be tried in a court of law and convicted of war crimes, for example. The killing of civilians, a given in modern warfare, is not a legal issue. It's a moral issue.

Many people consider George W. Bush a war criminal. I consider Nixon and Kissinger war criminals. In fact I think that all those who followed orders in bombing Cambodia and North Vietnam, and dropping napalm on South Vietnam to defoliate the countryside in order to expose the "enemy", thereby killing and maiming countless civilians, complicit in those crimes.

It's a moral issue.

[Harry Kershner]

If Russia had "actionable intelligence" that an anti-Russian terrorist was hiding in a house in Portland and therefore ordered a drone to drop a bomb on the house, no one could complain, at least according to Craig's analysis.

This is one of Chomsky's favorite lessons, one that is referred to by Christians, I understand, as the Golden Rule. If you want to know if some military action taken by us is moral, ask yourself if it is moral when taken by others against us. (In fact, we do have terrorists hiding in America with the full knowledge and protection of our government, so the analogy holds.)

When war crimes are committed, those who committed them are guilty, even if those who ordered them should be held to a higher standard. Aggressive war (which is the appropriate label for our crimes in Indo-China and Iraq) is, according to the findings at Nuremberg, "the supreme crime" from which all other war crimes are derived. All soldiers waging aggressive war are therefore guilty of war crimes. (This is a good reason for people not to enlist in a military that has been shown to have committed war crimes many times in the past.)

It's the attitude of "American Exceptionalism", the belief that our crimes are justified because of our obvious moral and political superiority, that others in the world find most reprehensible about us.

[KristinMcdaniel20]

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