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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group

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To: JohnM who wrote (15117)	12/30/2001 12:04:25 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (3) of 281500

It's interesting particularly because the issue of defining terrorism is, I think, inherently political. Yesterday's television discussion of the distinction between using ends and means to help with the definition results in a situational definition of terrorism which would not please US admin types. It goes like this. The "means" definition of terrorism, advocated on the program, is that it occurs when noncombatants are targeted. I would guess there are refined definitions which are more complex but for conversations purposes this might do. If that is the case, then the US becomes a terrorist nation by virtue of its fire bombing of German cities and its nuclear bombing of Japanese cities. That comparison would, with the slightest bit of tweaking, produce an argument that nations, groups, individuals, engage in situational terrorism or acts which can be considered terrorist but do not themselves become terrorist (in an attempt to get rid of the essentialism of the "US is a terrorist nation") formulation. Don't definitions of terrorism need to exclude the parameters of nation states at war? There are always civilian casualties in war, doubly so in modern total wars.

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