Pointedstick wrote:
Coffee wrote:
Why? Do drone strikes cause more collateral damage than carpet bombing we did in Vietnam?
No. But we
stopped carpet bombing in Vietnam. If we resumed it with drones I would definitely expect Vietnamese terrorism.
Coffee wrote:
Even with conventional rockets, when terrorists hide behind schools and hospitals, do you think counter strikes at those targets create less collateral damage than drones?
What I'm saying is that it doesn't matter. If your brother is blown up in a drone strike, are you going to say to yourself, "Well, at least those Americans spent billions of dollars developing precision-guided munitions, or else my sister and mother might have gotten it too!" ?
Dead is dead. Angry about it is angry about it.
Muslims don't have a monopoly on the use of terrorism.
Coffee mentioned a few non-Muslim nations that don't engage in terrorism, but terrorism has broad appeal when your opponent is much stronger than you.
The Native Americans' methods of resisting anglo expansion into their lands looked a lot like terrorism (as did some of the U.S. methods of retaliating, including what were essentially biological attacks).
To cite more recent examples, wouldn't it be correct to describe Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, and Hitler as terrorists? They used the arbitrary infliction of violence on civilians as a means of instilling a sense of fear in the populace. That's terrorism right?
Harry Truman was the subject of two assassination attempts. The first was through a letter bomb sent in 1947 by a group of radical zionists (isn't it ironic that Truman would be the subject of an assassination attempt by people who supported the creation of an independent state of Israel?).
The second assassination attempt on Truman was by a group of Puerto Rican nationalists who were unhappy with U.S. policy toward Puerto Rico (sort of like the 9/11 hijackers were unhappy with U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East).
Cuba has long been considered a state-sponsor of terrorism. The Castro regime is far from an Islamic state.
The Irish Republican Army was involved in many incidents that were clearly acts of terrorism.
The FARC in Colombia is a terrorist organization (or a group of freedom fighters, depending on your perspective).
How about the MRTA in Peru (remember the 1996 Japanese embassy hostage episode?).
While Nicaragua may not be smuggling bombs across our borders, they are apparently acting as hosts for a Hezbollah training camp, sort of like Afghanistan did for the Taliban in the 1990s.
Panamanian terrorists? Meet the
Sovereign Panama Front:
The Sovereign Panama Front (FPS) is a nationalist organization committed to ending foreign intervention, mainly that of the U.S., in Panama. The group reportedly claimed responsibility for a September 1992 bombing of three government buildings in Panama City, and a group into which the FPS later assimilated was implicated in attacks during Panama Canal transfer ceremonies in December 1999. Otherwise, the FPS and its leadership have advocated organized resistance to foreign military presence in Panama through picketing and demonstrations.
The leader of the FPS was a physician and active member in Panamanian politics named Jorge Gamboa Arosemena. Little is known about the group's founding, though similar nationalist groups formed in the wake of the December 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama in Operation Just Cause, which deposed President Manuel Noriega and led to hundreds of Panamanian military and civilian deaths and thousands of displaced citizens.
On the night of 18 September 1992, three bombs exploded in Panama City at the buildings of the Electoral Tribunal, the Foreign Ministry, and an office of the Tocumen International Airport. The attacks injured two people, and two different groups -- the Sovereign Panama Front and the Esteban Huertas Patriotic Front -- reportedly claimed responsibility for the attacks, though the claims could not be verified. A separate organization called M-20 (Movement of the 20th of December, referring to the date of the U.S. invasion) did not claim involvement but had been responsible for similar terrorist attacks.
I agree that there haven't been any Vietnamese-led hijackings of U.S. planes, but I'll bet if you had asked the French government in the 1950s about the #1 foreign terrorist threat, they might have said that it was Vietnamese nationalist groups.
I think that part of the reason the U.S. hasn't struggled with Vietnamese terrorism is that the U.S. left Vietnam after the war.
While we're in that part of the world, though, isn't North Korea considered a state sponsor of terrorism? They're not Muslims (not even close).
I agree that there are a lot of Islamic terrorists in the world, but there are also a lot of non-Islamic terrorists as well.
***
The U.S. has a knack for seeing its shady foreign friends turn into enemies, which then requires lavish spending to get rid of them. Consider the following U.S. sponsored individuals who did the dirty work of U.S. foreign policy, but who later required liquidation after they turned hostile toward the U.S.:
Manuel Noriega
Saddam Hussein
Osama bin Laden
Rather than going to the massive trouble of getting rid of people like this, why not just avoid creating them in the first place?
