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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group

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To: c.hinton who wrote (229205)	5/1/2007 2:25:27 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) of 281500

I think you are confused about what "targeting civilians" means. Nearly all the mass killing in WWII was done as part of economic warfare. In total war, you have to destroy the economic base of the other side. Some generals, like "Bomber Harris", on the Allied Side or Goering on the Nazi side, thought that bombing could break civilian morale but this was disproved in the event. Now, what al Qaeda is doing is causing chaos and death for its own sake. They are not carefully targeting the civilians of "the other side" - their bombs go off in Sunni as well as Shia markets, they are bombing Fallujah and Ramadi, places which ought to be their bases. They just want hundreds and thousands of dead civilians. This wouldn't have worked in WWII because no military objective would have been achieved, and it certainly wouldn't have been a propaganda victory for the Nazis to have blown up thousands of German civilians. So something important has changed, and that something is the power of Al Jazeera and the MSM to give Al Qaeda the appearance of a victory just because they can kill some civilians, they don't even have to be choosy which ones.

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