<Terrorism is an attack on civilians>
That's way too easy to knock down.
Then the U.S. is a terrorist state, as we have done this on a massive scale, and repeatedly, in the 20th Century, and 19th, and before, beginning when George Washington ordered ethnic cleansing against the "Civilized Tribes" of upper New York. Hiroshima, firebombing of dozens of cities in WWII, almost every war against dozens of Native tribes.
You can try to wriggle out of this by:
1. saying that these were legitimate military targets. This requires a willfull systematic disregard of the historical evidence.
2. a very creative definition of the word "legitimate".
3. saying that if there is one munitions factory sitting in a city of a million civilians, it's OK to carpet-bomb the entire city.
In addition to the above, whenever we have fought against a guerrilla army (from 1780s upper New York to 1890s Phillipines to 1960s Vietnam), it has proven impossible (except in theory) to distinguish guerrillas from the supportive civilian population, so we end up doing massive systematic violence against them. No U.S. General said, "When enough Natives have died from hunger and exposure, because we burned their houses and fields, the __________ (Apaches, Seminoles, Moros, Vietcong, etc., etc.) will give up." But that's exactly how it worked out in practice, and the Generals in charge knew it. |
