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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group
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To: one_less who wrote (145579)9/14/2004 12:55:09 PM
From: GST  Read Replies (1) of 281500
 
Tickle free is an honorable position, far more consistent with our stated ideals. We live in a world where far too often we "adjust" the meaning of words to accommodate all the tickle room we want. We targeted civilians in WWII and hundreds of thousands of them in acts so horrific it is hard to imagine -- firestorms that killed man, woman and child with an inferno from hell, and arguably far more horrible than the nuclear attacks on primarily civilian targets. The horror of the killing was meant to have a terrorizing effect. We targeted civilians in Vietnam, but more as a function of including civilians as potential enemy combatants because, being Vietnamese, they might want to try to kill us. I am afraid the same is happening in Iraq. We fire into houses and know not who is in them. We fire into streetcrowds, not caring too much about who is standing on the street.

The definition of justifiable terror provided by neocon shows the problem -- the "insurgents" in Iraq are "justified" in targeting civilians when these civilains can be seen as implicitly or explicitly collaborating with the US. The "tickle room" we give ourselves is part of a downward spiral of behavior in which we justify our actions as "necessary" under the circumstances. When the dead woman and children are brought to the morgue, we call them "human shields", indicating that we did not put on bomb on their heads, but rather somebody put them under our bomb. This provides plenty of tickle room. The dead civilians are just the cost of doing business as we see it.
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