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Rob, did you mean to frag people celebrating the WTC and Pentagon attack, or the people celebrating the attacks on Mosques?

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Both, I think.

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Rob doesn't consider the mosque attacks atrocities.

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Not yet, I don't. Nobody's died, AFAIK.

But let's get something straight. This is no longer the Civil-War era of "Let's go out and watch the battle, cause nobody'll shoot at us, we're civilians." WWII saw the end of that forever, and introduced the concept of "Total War."

At the very least, those who are celebrating these attacks IN America (and other non-Islamic countries) should be deported to these countries which they think are so great.

That doesn't mean we should target civilians. "Oooh, there's a university in Kabul. Okay, let's bomb the dorms, the science building, oh, let's set two tomahawks for the union..."

When and if we determine a government has played a role in this attack, then military targets certainly are fair play. Barracks, boot camps, supply depots, naval facilities, air facilities, etc. If we decide to target any government buildings, like capitals or federal buildings, we should do so when we can assure ourselves of a low civilian body count.

"If you want to keep playing this game, we can play it too, and we can play it better and harder than you can. Don't ever touch us again, because we'll pay you back a thousand times."

Or to paraphrase the punchline of a favorite joke... "We ain't PLAYED 'Cowboys and Terrorists' yet."

Hey, we like screaming about how wrong it is to attack our civilians, but we've got no problem doing it to yours because we're a bunch of fucking hipocrites.

Not to mention it would erode our support by the nations of the world.

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"If you want to keep playing this game, we can play it too, and we can play it better and harder than you can. Don't ever touch us again, because we'll pay you back a thousand times."

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And I don't think that would discourage people.

[ September 13, 2001: Message edited by: MeGotBeer ]

"If you want to keep playing this game, we can play it too, and we can play it better and harder than you can."

Offering dragons quarter is no good. They regrow their heads and come on again. They have to be killed.

There are three schools of thought in the world, and history has shown them to be, in increasing measure of success:

1. Do unto others.

2. Do unto others as you would be done by.

3. At first, do unto others as you would be done by, and then do unto them as they do unto you.

The first breeds enemies.

The second works, but only as long as all of your neighbors follow the same principle, which, as we know, not everybody does.

This discussion illustrates, I think, the Problem of Terrorism and How to Fight It.

Consider:

In the 20th Century, we had to adapt to the concept of a total war, eluded to elsewhere in this thread or perhaps another. That is, the someone chivalrous European notion₁ of wars being fought between two trained armies was abandoned by the reality of wars being fought between nations, where anything and everything within those nations became a target. This was cause for much concern. (Consider the casualty rates for WWII.)

However, adapt we did, primarily because we didn't have a choice, but also because the ever-evolving concept of nationalism made it easy to confuse peoples with governments.₂

That is no longer the case.

What has just been demonstrated so horribly is the influence of non-governmental organizations. Osama Bin Ladin is not a government. His organization is not a government. They have no physical territory. No GDP. But they do have an idea that many others agree with.

I don't want to sound pretentious here, as that's a great pet peeve of mine, but it strikes me that the war we are about to fight is a memetic one.₃ Terrorism is fueled by ideas, and ideas can only be combated by other ideas. We've seen lots of talk about these attacks being attacks not just on the United States but on a somewhat nebulous batch of concepts; freedom, democracy, and capitalism included. This may be true. I think it's dangerous to speculate about motives until we have some idea of who all the players are. At any rate, assuming this is true, how can we respond? If the issue is, say, Liberal Democracy vs. Wahhabi Theocracy₄, how do we go about fighting that war? We could smash every such government in the world.₅ But the idea would still exist.

Of course, all this is somewhat seperate from the point at hand, which is the punishment of those directly responsible. This is a much less thorny issue, once all the investigations are completed. But the larger issue remains.

1: Of course, there were always atrocities lurking beneath the surface. Villages destroyed in an attack or pillaged afterwards. The main difference is that the technoloy of war at the time did not allow this to occur on a large scale.

2: This footnote is pretty irrelevant, actually, but there was something I wanted to bring up that didn't fit into where I was going.

In WWII, and all modern wars, civilians die in great numbers. Specifically, how many Germans in Berlin or Dresden or Hamburg were actually soldiers or Nazi party members? The usual justification is that these people were nevertheless supporting the German war effort, and I think that's probably correct, as far as it goes. But it raises the question of what constitutes an acceptable civilian casualty.

3: Memetics being a sort of study of how ideas propagate, which you probably already know, but which is explained here anyway.

4: Wahhabi being a particular, rather strict interpration of Islamic law, or Shari'a. The Jack Chick of Islam.

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They were ALL gearing up to fight off an invasion

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I strongly suggest you read Hiroshima by John Hershey.

They were all gearing up to fight off an invasion? Blanket statement indeed. Does this include all the children going to school or running errands for their parents? Does this include the people who are not in the military but are simple shopkeepers, farmers, diner owners, etc? Oh wait, the shopkeepers sell stuff to the military, and the farmers and diner owners feed the soldiers. Yeah that's right, they deserved to be nuked.

I suppose you only believe it when American casualties are involved, huh?

[ September 14, 2001: Message edited by: Tahna Los ]