September 11th

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the point is, at least I think so, is that America and other countries (no bashing intended) has committed the same kind of atrocities, which we think is okay, but when we our self is hit, it is terrorism and evilness. I mean how many afghan and Iraqis Civils haven't died during the war on terror alone, thanks to Western justice or before during the sanctions.
I think Morgoth point was, we aren't much better when we bomb enemy towns, it's still civilians who are hurt.

 

Who's 'we'? Not to sound all high and mighty, but I don't remember my country bombing anyone or thing.

I am against war, that I am sure of. But if war becomes neccesary, then fight it out like they did in the Napoleon Era. Gather all armies on a field, fire everything you got at eachother, last man standing wins. No civilian fatalities.

But that will never happen. As long as there are disagreements, there will be fights. As long as there are fights, there will be wars. And in war, people die. Real people. Not numbers. Not statistics. REAL PEOPLE! And until the world in general realizes this, then people will continue to die.

But how does 9/11 fit in? There was no war. The US was not a war with anybody. But does that mean that someone wasn't at war with them? The United States isn't perfect. No country is. A country's primary goal is to take care of it's own. If this means stepping on some toes to do it, then so be it.

Did the US do something to warrant this attack? No, nothing constitutes the taking of innocent lives. Did the attackers feel that the US did something to warrant such an attack? Yes, they did, for they were willing to stake their lives on it.

So the question is, who deserves how much of the blame?

 

The people who organised and carried out the attacks on the WTC definately do not represent the rest of Iraq, Islam, etc.. They are a minority and, although we (or 'one', as Jaguar would have it) may perceive what they did as evil, etc. it was really just an act of self-defence for their country because they were led to believe that America was the reason for their country's problems, or something along those lines - even though America may not have been the actual casue for their problems. Although what they did may not have solved anything (and did, if fact, cause many innocent casualties), they probably thought it was 'right' and as such, I don't see it as 'evil' or 'wrong', just misguided.

When America attacked Iraq in retaliation (assuming that IS why they attacked Iraq, which is a whole other argument), many innocent people were killed. America was just doing what they thought was 'right'. BTW I seriously doubt that whoever organised the attack on the WTC did it purely to cause civilian casualties and terror in general.

In regards to the Dresden thing, I think it is very relevant to this discussion. As Equester said, America and other countries are angry at the WTC attacks, when they have been behind other attacks of a similar nature themselves. Obviously this isn't fair.

P.S., I know I have been generalising a lot in this post, even though I've been denouncing generalisation myself. When I refer to a country (e.g. America) I mean that country in general (and that country's government), not individuals in that country, who may have completely different views from others etc..

[ September 11, 2004, 14:35: Message edited by: Void ]

 

@Saravok: do you actually know any Muslims, or do you just see them on TV?

@joacqin: I think it's probably some kind of mix of Arab nationalism and fundamentalist Wahhabism. And it's not just directed at the West; I would guess Darfur has a similar motivation...

@Nizidramanii'yt: yes, there do seem to be some gaps in your knowlegde. Condemning Turkish Muslims as "aggressive" while Arab Muslims are "peaceful," perhaps owing to the immigration of lowerclass Turkish, as opposed to Arab, Muslims to your country, makes me think you would be similarly harsh on any other lowerclass immigrant group to Belgium, be they Arab, Slavic Christians, etc. But in comparing the Turks to the Arabs, remember that Turkey is, though not without tension, a highly secularized democracy, which gave women the right to vote I think even before Belgium did. This is not only due to Turkey's rapid secularization post WWI, but also a certain matriarchal tradition the Turks followed prior to Islam. The Turks have thus been resistant to the patriarchal Wahhabism motivating many of the terrorist attacks.

Unfortunately, there are elements of Wahhabism that do point toward global cultural conquest. Remember that two French journalists are being held in Iraq to threaten France's secularist head-scarf ban. Of course, one could say the same about (American? European?) market liberalism, in that it also forces the cultures that come into contact with it to change. Though market liberalism should always be criticized, it somehow seems a bit more benign to me than Wahhabism. I don't think there is a "clash of civilizations" here, as I still hope that internal Arab dialogue will resolve this.

And I find a certain small part of the European criticism of America to be disingenuous here; much of the instability in these parts of the world stemmed from European colonialism, which began long before Americans arrived on the scene, and which continues to a lesser extent even today. You don't think that Belgium, which was particularly cruel in it's subjugation of the Congo, had anything to do with setting up the conditions for the Rwanda genocide?

Not to say that America shouldn't be roundly criticized for it's bungled "war on terror..."

@Jaguar: I must say, I also find much of the Canadian criticism of the US to be similarly disingenuous. The Canadian and US economies are incredibly interlinked. You have the same fortune 500 companies, the same oil companies etc. The price of gas in Canada is as affected by American oil policy as the price of gas in the US. To think you can take the benefits of this without being implicated by the negatives seems a little self-serving.

I was about a mile from Ground Zero on 9/11, and saw both towers fall. I certainly didn't vote for Bush, nor did most New Yorkers, nor did most of the people in the towers. Would it have really made things more just had they crashed their planes into the new (empty) Enron tower in Houston, where they certainly could have caught more Republicans, and more people directly involved in extracting oil from the middle east?

@Equester and Void: I would agree that modern warfare is terrible in the way it targets civilians. This is both 1) the result of aerial warfare, and 2) the fact that nearly everyone now sees war as happening largely between manufacturing economies, so that wars now target an enemy's economic base. Civilians are thus involved. In the US Civil war, Sherman's infamous march to the sea essentially ended the war by crippling the Southern economy. Towards the end of WWI, Britain purposefully caused mass starvation in Germany by blockading its ports. As for aerial warfare, the allies in D-day killed tens of thousands of civilians as they tried to bomb German positions (often among civilians). Dresden stands out both because of the horror of fire bombing, and because it was somewhat gratuitous (i.e., not such a valuable military target). All of these things are undeniably cruel, and it would be far better if they never happened or had to happen.

Granted that the means are ugly, I guess we have to move on to the ends. The ends of D-day (if not Dresden) are now largely supported, while the ends of the Nazi bombings of London, etc., are not, though the loss of life was of course equally tragic at an individual level. It seems to me a bit to quick to say that 1) all loss of civilian life in war is tragic, so therefore 2) all loss of civilian life in war is morally equivalent. If an Indonesian Wahhabist thinks that having a bunch of rowdy drunken Aussie perverts in his country is offensive and dangerous to his culture, can he really be justified in mass murder? Is he only "misguided?" Or, is killing in the name of patriarchal fundamentalism the same as killing in the name of liberal democracy?

Again, this is not to justify current US policies in Iraq, which have been, I think, both misguided and incompetantly executed...

 

The problem with this line of thinking is that it is the Iraqi people who should be celebrating the demise of Saddam. He was a tyrant and a butcher. The people who died in the attacks on 9/11 were neither.

But the current problem for the Iraqi people is how to deal with the American occupation, which is a separate issue now that Saddam is gone. For the Americans the war in Iraq has been a large distraction from the true "War on Terror" and it has not made America safer. Is Iraq now a larger breeding ground for Islamic terrorists?" Let me explain:

At the start of the war against the "insurgents" it was often cited that they were "supporters of Saddam." This gave the impression that the war was still being fought against the "old regime." But now the current rhetoric is that American forces are fighting to defend the "newly installed government of Iraq." The question becomes: "whose government is it?" This should be a purely political problem for both Iraq and America, which should have a political solution.

The problem with this is that there is little separation of religion and politics in the region. In fact, they are often the same thing (this valuable lesson could be learned in some other quarters as well). But is the war on terror becoming a code word for a war against a particular strand of Isalm? If this becomes a religious war, this could be a real problem for Americans. Most Americans have no problem drawing a solid line between politics and religion. But the problem is worse for Muslims, because the lines are not so readily apparent.

The real war against terror should be fought against Bin Laden and his minions. The importance of this is that the focus remains on a particular man and organization, which has a largely political agenda, despite the thin cover of a "Holy War."

The rhetoric of Bin Laden is largely political. He despises both the Saudi and Israeli regimes - and American support for both. As long as America keeps the war on political grounds and that we are defending our own freedom and defending our ally (Israel) we are safe to do pretty much what we desire with Bin Laden and his henchmen.

We collectively had this large national debate about Islam right after 9/11. It was Bin Laden and his henchmen who turned to the issue of Israel and the Saudi Royal Family with their statements after 9/11. Thus, we can define this war as largely a political one. It is also both a political and a moral justification for the War in Afghanistan. America has the right to defend the freedom and security of its own people. That is both a political and a moral statement.

 

My major objection to the Dresden comparison (or Hiroshima for that matter) is that both countries were in a state of war. There wasn't a single person in Dresden who didn't know that. When the bombers were approacing Dresden the Luftwaffe sent up planes to shoot them down. On the ground anti-aircraft guns were firing to try to shoot them down. In this case the bombers won and Dreden burned. In the 1940s strategic bombing and precision bombing were not the same thing. Now in our "kinder/gentler" society a bombing such as Dresden wouldn't be politically acceptable. Instead we would use smart bombs and cruise missles and level every factory in sight.

Now compare this to 9/11. There wasn't and basically still isn't any formal act of war between the U.S. and whomever you wish to blame for the towers. The attackers hijacked and turned commercial airliners into weapons of mass destruction. The airliners were used to attack innocent civilians whom had no warning and their government (who was without warning) had no ability to defend them.

I see major differences between the two attacks. To me it is the same as comparing Pearl Harbor to Germany's London Blitz. Pearl harbor will always be considered heinous even though the Japanese only attacked military targets. The Blitz which essentially only attacked civilian targets is not looked upon as an atrocity.

As the Russians found out this is not a battle that is going to end easily. The nations that sit on the sidelines and "critique" will one day rue their decisions.

 

Destroying one building isn't exactly mass destruction.

I might be the only one, but I find the blitz a great atrocity and much worse then pearl harbor (I'm not saying pearl harbor wasn't bad or anything, attacking unprovoked and without warning is always bad, but it was a military target)

 

I think there's a consent that all carpet bombings of that time were atrocities. And they generally are looked at as atrocities.

 

If you're working in an arms factory (and you KNOW you're working in an arms factory) during a time of war then you have to accept the fact that you will be a target because you are directly assisting your country's war effort. However if you're working in a fish market you are not assisting the war effort. To kill the people working in the fish market is far worse than to kill people in the arms factory because the fish market is no threat to your country and niether are the people working there.

If you work/live NEAR an arms factory then you have to accept the fact that it's a prime enemy target - that factory is responsiable for the deaths caused by the arms produced there. If you're next to it when it gets attacked, don't call atrocity. Carpet bombings was the only way to accuratly hit ground targets, today carpet bombing is only used in military only areas because there are ways of only striking military targets in civilian areas.

 

Yes, I know plenty of Muslims, lots and lots and lots of them. I have worked with them, lived and even slept with them. My experiences with Muslim people have not been good ones and I have no time or care for them people at all. I hope that one day they will all be deported out of Britain back to wherever they came from. I am racist yes but I have grown up in a totally different environment to you. There is nothing wrong with me and do not think that you are better then me because you are anti-racist, you are no better or worse, you have just learned to think differently.

 

Wow. Just...wow.