http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/?last_story=/opi...3/us_terror_in_iraq/

If they're so innocent, what are they doing in Iraq?

I have to say, if I was in the infantry and getting pasted by an enemy, I'd call in close air support as well.

"state terror"

[sigh]

Our poor language, it can barely suffer any more post-9/11 twisting, can it? For people in the mainstream who study terrorism, the going definition of terrorism is something along the lines of:
the use or threatened use of violence by a person or non-state organization against people or property for political purposes.

As opposed to the use or threatened use of violence by a state against people or property for political purposes, which is what is called WAR, not "state terror."

State terror is traditionally defined as unlawful intimidation or violence exercised by agents of a state against its own citizens to coerce them into submission. Such as unlawful arrests, disappearances, etc.

People are now calling war "state terror" because they feel that calling it "war" legitimizes it. (And probably for some ironic amusement value.) I'd rather they spent their efforts on reminding people that war is horrible and ugly. It's not like there's any paucity of historical evidence on their side. They think they're being clever, but in reality, I don't think that the people they fail to reach by criticizing warfare are going to be any more receptive to criticisms of what they're falsely labeling "state terror."

What bloggers and other critics have now taken to calling state terrorism is and always has been war. War is what's happening when state actors are blowing the shit out of your people and stuff with the aim of getting your state to submit. "Civil war" is what you get when at least two competing groups with claims to statehood in the same territory blow the shit out of each other for political reasons. That's what's happening now in Iraq. Counter-insurgency on that scale easily falls under the heading of civil war. Neither war nor civil war is state terror, though certain elements of civil war do get pretty close to state terror.

The fact that most people's conception of what happens in warfare is totally fucked up hardly merits further destruction of our language. Pretty soon, every word we have will have been stripped of any specific meaning. Maybe we'll be able to communicate with grunts and sign language, or maybe we'll finally get around to switching to Esperanto for serious discourse.

Note: This post will absofuckinglutely, positively be misinterpreted in a variety of ass backward ways. I'll be happy to clarify as necessary.

Hey wait, the commander in chief denies there's a civil war in Iraq.

Hi split!

Your post seems perfectly clear to me, Split. I need to think about it a bit to see how much I agree, but it is clear.

Thanks, Lester. I just think the public discourse has devolved to something like

"You shouldn't support the war. War is terrible."

"But I do support the war. And I don't like terrorism."

"Oh. Well then it's not a war. It's state terror. If you don't like terrorism, then you can't like it."

"Uhhhh, go away."

quote:

Originally posted by Boogerhead:
Hey wait, the commander in chief denies there's a civil war in Iraq.

I reserve the right to be skeptical.

quote:

Hi split!

Hi! This is a nice town, ain't it?

TBH, I hadn't even really clicked that the term 'state terror' was used in the article - certainly wasn't why I posted it. The point was more just to illustrate that the war is an on-going clusterfuck. And now that Cheney's rhetoric on Iran is leaping to even more surreal heights, it could easily end up being, like Afhganistan, a forgotten clusterfuck.

quote:

Originally posted by Splitcoil:
"state terror"

[sigh]
Note: This post will absofuckinglutely, positively be misinterpreted in a variety of ass backward ways. I'll be happy to clarify as necessary.

I'll start: it seems to me that debates such as these which center around the philological divert and distance one from the actuality of war, whatsoever one may call it.

Codifying and analyzing the terminology, the specifics of banality and the propoganda of a given conflict merely serves to compartmentalize terror and warfare.

I'm not trying to suggest that you fall into the camp wanting to do this but from my vanatge point I imagine a soldier on the ground, taking fire, getting back to camp alive, shooting the shit and not much giving a fuck what public calls their "war." In fact, from what I've found, though I'll admit not through personal experience, soldiers don't much give a fuck about anything the public at large thinks while they are still in the midst of a war. the immediacy of that situation is paramount.

quote:

For people in the mainstream who study terrorism, the going definition of terrorism is something along the lines of:
the use or threatened use of violence by a person or non-state organization against people or property for political purposes.

Given most of the people in the mainstream who "study terrorism" work for state entities, it's hardly surprising they include such an irrelevant and dishonest exclusion in their definition.

quote:

As opposed to the use or threatened use of violence by a state against people or property for political purposes, which is what is called WAR, not "state terror."

Really? Clearly you don't mean death squads and such as I'm sure your get-out note implies - though such methods of internal security perfectly satisfy your definition. I'd have a problem myself in using "state terror" to label anything other than internal repression of that kind because doing so unnecessarily smears the meaning of that precise phrase, but I have no problem whatsoever in the proposition that offical militaries can engage in terrorism as a tactic. As I point out with tiresome regularity, if terrorism is a word that serves any purpose other than rhetoric then it applies because of the target and purpose of the attack, and the perpetrator is irrelevant. IE, it applies to attacks on civilian targets, for the purpose of coercing a policy or diplomatic shift. Is that really not distinguishable from attacks aimed at destroying the opposing side's military personnel, materiel, capacity and/or resources?

Mr Floyd explains fairly clearly why he regards US airstikes in Iraq as being terrorism rather than conventional military strikes indiscriminately causing civilian casualties (for which the term "state terror" would be misleading - although not as misleading as the attending euphemisms) when he alleges that the targetting of civilians is deliberate and has a punitive or coercive motivation. Now, you can argue that isn't true - but I don't think you're entitled to argue that, even if it were true, the attacks wouldn't be terrorism because they were committed by people working for a state.

I'm not saying that warfare is morally superior to terrorism, Rob. I'm not saying that at all. Other things (such as the justness of the cause) equal, warfare is usually worse than terrorism, because it's perpetrated at a higher tempo, on a larger scale, by more efficient means.

Killing civilians with "punitive or coercive motivation" has always been part of war. It's not an act of terrorism. It's a war crime. Not nicer, not morally superior.

"War crime" is a more specific, more appropriate term which people are quite familiar with. So why re-label it with a broader term? The Law of Armed Conflict makes such attacks illegal, and the US Uniform Code of Military Justice lays out specific charges that can be brought against such criminals. So why not call them war crimes?

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:
In fact, from what I've found, though I'll admit not through personal experience, soldiers don't much give a fuck about anything the public at large thinks while they are still in the midst of a war. the immediacy of that situation is paramount.

Well then, you've found a bunch of bullshit. Probably from watching movies. If they didn't care what the public thought, and weren't worried about being prosecuted for war crimes, then a whole hell of a lot more Iraqi civilians would be getting machine-gunned every day, sparky.

Ok - this is gonna get kind of geeky, which is unfortunate given what we're talking about, but...

quote:

I'm not saying that warfare is morally superior to terrorism, Rob.

I don't imagine you are, but the motivation of people to avoid using the T word for something which they would quickly describe as terrorism but for the fact it was done by state actors (or, more often than not, state actors on their side) is clearly to make such an argument of moral distinction. I simply wish to deny them that subterfuge.

quote:

Killing civilians with "punitive or coercive motivation" has always been part of war. It's not an act of terrorism. It's a war crime.

Killing civilians is a warcrime. Killing civilians for coercive purposes is terrorism and a warcrime (these days - from memory, the Hague Convention allowed for the killing of civilian hostages as a method of holding your opponent to the rules of war.)

So to answer your question - because the term is apt. It accurately describes certain tactics and should be used in all cases re those tactics. The only reason to exclude the actions of states from the definition is if, perhaps, you wish to limit the word specifically to the tactics and organisation of certain violent criminal networks - in other words if you want to keep it to a particular discipline within political science. But most people don't use it that way either.

Just to be clear - I don't insist we go around calling this stuff terrorism rather than something else. I just fundamentally reject the notion that when the term is being used states get a free pass. So it's kind of a reactive position in that way.

Yeah, thanks for ascribing such nice motivations to me. Another reason why a person might wish to stick to the proper terminology is because a person might want to see war criminals prosecuted effectively. You can't prosecute war criminals successfully under American (and likely under no country's) terrorism statutes because the crimes don't fit the statutes. Those crimes do fit exactly with various war crimes that a person can be prosecuted for. Also, it is far easier to prosecute for war crimes than it is to prosecute for so-called terrorism.

The perpetrator is relevant in the eyes of the law, especially when the perpetrator is someone entrusted by the state with the exercise of its powers. Especially when the person so entrusted has received many (accounted for and recorded) hours of mandatory training informing him of the laws of war, informing him of the penalties for transgressions, and informing him of the procedures for challenging unlawful orders to commit such transgressions. He may even have had to take quizzes to prove he had been paying attention. The same does not apply for terrorism statutes, sadly.

Moreover, some people just like to use the right word. If "war crime" has lost its impact on the psyche, then perhaps that impact needs to be restored.

quote:

Originally posted by RobW:
Just to be clear - I don't insist we go around calling this stuff terrorism rather than something else. I just fundamentally reject the notion that when the term is being used states get a free pass. So it's kind of a reactive position in that way.

Okay, fair enough and I can see where you're coming from. But I see your position as a surrender to the terms of post-9/11 discourse dictated by the idiots on the far right who want to label everything that's bad as "terrorism."

There are other bad things. There are much worse things. War crimes are much worse than "terrorism" in my mind, because if left unchecked then you eventually get a massive, industrial killing machine with no limits on their behavior. Results are predictably bad. Soldiers are trained, armed and supplied to kill. When their behavior goes out of bounds, the results are much worse than any terrorist organization can manage.

quote:

post-9/11 discourse dictated by the idiots on the far right who want to label everything that's bad as "terrorism."

Oh, that schtick predates 9-11. Arguably by several decades.

As for the rest - fair enough, but Floyd's not talking about individual atrocities committed outside standing military rules. He's talking about command and political leadership approved tactics - and if prosecutions were undertaken against those responsible in such cases they would be most unlikely to proceed under domestic laws regardless of whether you talk about "war crimes" or "terrorism"*. (Anti-terrorism laws are largely a grift anyway, designed to criminalise "support" for terrorist organisations, which is to say, organisations so labelled on a government list. And to give the impression politicians are protecting us.) In any case, I dunno how using words accurately in common parlance is going to stymie lawyers applying legal concepts that might share terminology with common parlance but not meaning.

* Just for the record - I don't agree with Floyd's usage here. But, while reckless air attacks aren't terrorism, they're not war crimes in the sense you're using the term either, so no-one's going to be brought to book for the consequences of these tactics, any more than for the initial war crime, albeit not one you'll find mentioned in any domestic statute, of unprovoked aggression.

quote:

Dr.~ Rambali smiled. `There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at
which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself.
Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is inately media-related.

Warfare became terrorism with rumor, pamplets, film, television and now the internet tubes not because someone labeled war as terrorism. Insiting terror, through media, in individuals that are detached from the actual fighting in order to manipulate people for political and corporate agendas is terrorism. It is the inate media-relatation in order to manipulate the ideologies of people that has turned warfare into terrorism.

quote:

Originally posted by RobW:

As for the rest - fair enough, but Floyd's not talking about individual atrocities committed outside standing military rules. He's talking about command and political leadership approved tactics - and if prosecutions were undertaken against those responsible in such cases they would be most unlikely to proceed under domestic laws regardless of whether you talk about "war crimes" or "terrorism"*.

That's incorrect, sir. If a target of no military value is blown the fuck up, everyone involved who knew it had no military value is guilty of a crime. What usually happens in the case of US forces is that if it's investigated, the poor shmucks at the lowest levels get hammered in courts martial, then it might go up a couple levels of command or so before it fizzles and the highest ups get off for free. (I didn't say the system was perfect, just that it exists.)

If you can find some international authority that's more effective at prosecuting for US war crimes, I'd be interested to hear about it.

quote:

(Anti-terrorism laws are largely a grift anyway, designed to criminalise "support" for terrorist organisations, which is to say, organisations so labelled on a government list. And to give the impression politicians are protecting us.)

Thanks for the heads up. I'll make a note of that.

quote:

In any case, I dunno how using words accurately in common parlance is going to stymie lawyers applying legal concepts that might share terminology with common parlance but not meaning.

You're right. I read something about that on my hair dryer. Oh, "hair dryer" is the word I use for computer.

quote:

* Just for the record - I don't agree with Floyd's usage here. But, while reckless air attacks aren't terrorism, they're not war crimes in the sense you're using the term either, so no-one's going to be brought to book for the consequences of these tactics, any more than for the initial war crime, albeit not one you'll find mentioned in any domestic statute, of unprovoked aggression.

That's incorrect, Rob. Reckless air attacks ARE war crimes, regardless of the level they're approved at. That's not a matter os some convoluted argument I can make. That's a matter of established law. Unfortunately, they're also extremely hard to investigate and usually only get prosecuted effectively when participants with heavy consciences come forward.

Nevermind, this debate is pointless.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: UberDog,