1. O’Brien wrote: Israel is one main target for these activities, but the activities would not be likely to cease even if Israel came to an end. The Great Satan in the eyes of Ayatollah Khomeini–and of the millions for whom he speaks–is not Israel but the United States. The defeat of Israel would, in those eyes, be no more than a portent of the impending defeat of the Great Satan

   In fact, it would excite Islamofascists if Israel was wiped out. We would enter into a new era of extreme excitement with Islamofascist excitement for their pending triumph.

2. Of course, we who have the hindsight of history know that such coordination, cooperation, and resolve was only a pale shadow of what it needed to be to get the job done, and that in any event it did not last.

   There is the school of thought that even when you have such coordination, cooperation, and resolve you have to continue to cultivate it by coordinating and cooperating yourself. This is hardly what we did in 2002, when we took off somewhere else to shoot at some different Muslims who were not in the loop and left the ones that were in Pakistan.

   It is hardly encouraging to resolve when your partner appears to be bereft of common sense and the capacity for cooperation.

   Consider this: Russia is now the social victim of the heroin from Afghan poppies. They really would like to fix this. So it might be worth considering an alternative to placing anti-missile defenses smack on their border, even if you say that the true target is missiles from Iran. A certain amount of cooperation like this, instead of pretenses to be the Lone Ranger, might have been far more effective in 2002.

3. Joseph, I understand you have your view.

   We did what we did and I believe it changed the dynamics pretty radically in that part of the world for the better.

   How do I apply your statement, “It is hardly encouraging to resolve when your partner appears to be bereft of common sense”

   I’m guessing you are applying harsh judgment to Bush based on the previous paragraph.

   I have disagreed with Bush on a few areas including the illegal immigrant topic. And I might go as far as saying he doesn’t have common sense on that topic.

   But to say somebody is bereft of common sense? You aren’t persuasive when you do that.

4. Yes, Joseph, we all remember that history where the whole world was determined to really take it to Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Pakistan border, but were prevented from going forward because of the American neocons’ unaccountable obsession with a country that had no ties to terrorist extremism whatsoever.

5. Thanks, Neo, for digging that article up. I remember reading it but had forgotten who wrote it and when exactly. It gave me a healthy skepticism, not only towards terrorists, but to anyone who seeks inner personal gratification through sweeping political action. There have been plenty of New Lefties, Che admirers, greens, and ACLU fanatics that I have since taken with a huge grain of salt.

6. I always wonder at what point are we now to include what we know from then, that we learned from the archives?

   But also keep in mind that O’Brien wrote this before the suicide bomber became commonplace;

   so much for checking history…

   i thought suicide bombers were pretty common in wwii in the pacific. ever hear of kamikaze?

   In the late 17th century, Qing official Yu Yonghe recorded that injured Dutch soldiers fighting against Koxinga’s forces for control of Taiwan in 1661 would use gunpowder to blow up both themselves and their opponents rather than be taken prisoner.

   -=-=-=-=-=-=-

   Modern suicide bombing as a political tool can be traced back to the assassination of Czar Alexander II of Russia in 1881. Alexander fell victim to a Nihilist plot. While driving on one of the central streets of Saint Petersburg, near the Winter Palace, he was mortally wounded by the explosion of hand-made grenades and died a few hours afterwards. The Tzar was killed by a member of Narodnaya Volya, Ignacy Hryniewiecki, who died while intentionally exploding the bomb during the attack.

   -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

   During the Battle for Berlin the Luftwaffe flew “Self-sacrifice missions” (Selbstopfereinsatz) against Soviet bridges over the River Oder. These ‘total missions’ were flown by pilots of the Leonidas Squadron under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Heiner Lange. From 17 April until 20 April 1945
   

   so the idea of suicides in battle, and in warfare is VERY VERY old.

   which means that it has been in the tactical books for a long time and the choice of using it depends on NEEDS, not ideology.

   to read your pieve is to get the idea that suicides as a means of warfare is new… its not…

   What follows in O’Brien’s article is one of the best discussions of terrorists and their motives I’ve ever seen;

   i should rephrase that to be more valid.

   its the best discussion sans pertinent history, lots of facts, archive records, and seems to explain the craziness of those silly terrorists without ahving to invoke any valid history.

   how many explanations of said stuff have you seen in which ALL of history is considered?

   i have linked to a history… and that trounces his.

   why? cause the history and validation of it was by the people who actually started teh damn thin in modern times in the 70s, and defected and then told their story.

   so if your reading something and that something doesnt include the known updated history, then you are reading a fiction

   and your comments amount to a review as to how convincing one fiction is over another.

   this is how the left selects truth…
   it FEELS better it SOUNDS correct…

   who cares about facts, and history, and a timeline?

   what it is is his comments have diffused throughout the population, and sans other information, it feels right as it mirrors much of the commentaries, and puts a false reason on things taht sounds better than the truth.

   there is absolutely no history to judge his commentary. the terrorist stands alone. he is not invented, created and supported by third parties.

   its completely untrue for any international quality terrorism…

   The Arafat I Knew
   http://www.weizmann.ac.il/home/comartin/israel/pacepa-wsj.html
   He hasn’t changed since his days as a KGB-backed terrorist. / Wall Street Journal, Saturday, January
   12, 2002

   you go back to 86, and this article goes back to 73 or so…

   Gen. Sakharovsky asked us in Romanian intelligence to help the KGB bringing Arafat and some of his fedayeen fighters secretly to the Soviet Union via Romania, in order for them to be indoctrinated and trained. During that same year, the Soviets maneuvered to have Arafat named chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organizaiton, with public help from Egypt’s ruler, Gamal Abdel Nasser.
   

   they are made… like a marketer that is auditioning teens for a new tween group, the idiots prior actions and connections in the world is what makes him considered to get help and then co-opt them to the purpose of the third party.

   this is the third party who since all that time, and with the IRA and on and on, has supplied the explosives, weapons, expertise, training and advice.

   by why spoil a good false tale missing key information with history?

   and if you study any of this history in passing, you will find that these organizations do things and many are supported to create situations in which we analyse them, as you did, above without any regard for whats going on.

   image only no substance…

   for example.

   In January 1978, the PLO representative in London was assassinated at his office. Soon after that, convincing pieces of evidence started to come to light showing that the crime was committed by the infamous terrorist Abu Nidal, who had recently broken with Arafat and built his own organization. “That wasn’t a Nidal operation. It was ours,” Ali Hassan Salameh, Arafat’s liaison officer for Romania, told me. Even Ceausescu’s adviser to Arafat, who was well familiar with his craftiness, was taken by surprise. “Why kill your own people?” Col. Constantin Olcescu asked.

   “We want to mount some spectacular operations against the PLO, making it look as if they had been organized by Palestinian extremist groups that accuse the chairman of becoming too conciliatory and moderate,” Salameh explained. According to him, Arafat even asked the PLO Executive Committee to sentence Nidal to death for assassinating the PLO representative in London.

   so the actual goals are not anything that is in the article above.

   in the article above we are talking the beleifs of a useful idiot being manupulated… not the ones running the games.

   the fact that soviets would create these organizations and factions and even kill their own to create an image in which we will react (without considering the actuyal facts)

   in this way, the lie works.
   it works mostly because we comply and like good pets we just dont look when we want to explain something.

   here is another article, conveniently of the same title.
   The Arafat I knew
   http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article390859.ece

   again… nothing about anything in the shadows.

   Terrorism by the Soviet Union
   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_by_the_Soviet_Union

   and of course… it all again, goes back to marxists…

   The importance of terrorism as a revolutionary strategy has been widely debated by Marxists. According to Marx, “There is only one way to shorten and ease the convulsions of the old society and the bloody birth pangs of the new – revolutionary terror” [1]. Marx also believed that “The present generation resembles the Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness. It must not only conquer a new world, it must also perish in order to make a room for the people who are fit for a new world” [2]

   the idea that a state that is run on terrorism, is not part and parcel of terrorism as a way of life world wide would be what?

   Soviet secret services have been described by GRU defectors Viktor Suvorov and Stanislav Lunev as “the primary instructors of terrorists worldwide” [9] [10] [11] According to Ion Mihai Pacepa, KGB General Aleksandr Sakharovsky once said: “In today’s world, when nuclear arms have made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon.” [12] He also claimed that “Airplane hijacking is my own invention”. He claims that in 1969 alone, 82 planes were hijacked worldwide by the KGB-financed PLO. [12] George Habash, who worked under KGB guidance, [13] explained:

   “Killing one Jew far away from the field of battle is more effective than killing a hundred Jews on the field of battle, because it attracts more attention.” [12]
   Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa described operation “SIG” (“Zionist Governments”) that was devised in 1972, to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the United States. KGB chairman Yury Andropov explained to Pacepa that

   “a billion adversaries could inflict far greater damage on America than could a few millions. We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States.”
   The following liberation organizations have been established by the KGB: PLO, National Liberation Army of Bolivia (created in 1964 with help from Ernesto Che Guevara); the National Liberation Army of Colombia (created in 1965 with help from Cuba), Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine in 1969, and the Secret Army for Liberation of Armenia in 1975. [14] The leader of the PLO, Yasser Arafat, established close collaboration with the Romanian Securitate service and the Soviet KGB in the beginning of the 1970s.[15] The secret training of PLO guerrillas was provided by the KGB.[16] However, the main KGB activities and arms shipments were channeled through Wadie Haddad of the DFLP organization, who usually stayed in a KGB dacha BARVIKHA-1 during his visits to Russia. Led by Carlos the Jackal, a group of PFLP fighters accomplished a spectacular raid the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries office in Vienna in 1975. Advance notice of this operation “was almost certainly” given to the KGB.[15]

   A number of notable operations have been conducted by the KGB to support international terrorists with weapons on the orders from the Soviet Communist Party, including:

   Transfer of machine-guns, automatic rifles, Walther pistols, and cartridges to the Provisional Irish Republican Army by the Soviet intelligence vessel Reduktor (operation SPLASH) in 1972 to fulfill a personal request of arms from Michael O’Riordan.[17]
   Transfer of anti-tank grenade RPG-7 launchers, radio-controlled SNOP mines, pistols with silencers, machine guns, and other weaponry to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine through Wadi Haddad who was recruited as a KGB agent in 1970 (operation VOSTOK, “East”).[18]
   

   the article that he is painting above is romatinticized.

   where is the author talking bout the IRA being supplied by the KGB/GRU? well that wouldnt fly with the narrative of the lone people fighting for a cause, etc.

   all this is well known history…

   its been validated…

   The highest-ranking Soviet Bloc intelligence defector, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa claimed to have had a conversation with Nicolae CeauÅŸescu, who told him about “ten international leaders the Kremlin killed or tried to kill”: Laszlo Rajk and Imre Nagy from Hungary; LucreÅ£iu Pătrăşcanu and Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej from Romania; Rudolf Slansky and Jan Masaryk from Czechoslovakia; the Shah of Iran; Palmiro Togliatti from Italy; John F. Kennedy; and Mao Zedong. Pacepa described a plot to kill Mao Zedong with the help of Lin Biao organized by the KGB and stated that “among the leaders of Moscow’s satellite intelligence services there was unanimous agreement that the KGB had been involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.” [19]

   The second President of Afghanistan Hafizullah Amin was killed by KGB OSNAZ forces. Presidents of the unrecognized Chechen Republic of Ichkeria organized by Chechen separatists including Dzhokhar Dudaev, Zelimkhan Yandarbiev, Aslan Maskhadov, and Abdul-Khalim Saidullaev were killed by FSB and affiliated forces.[citation needed]

   Other widely publicized cases are murders of Russian communist Leon Trotsky and Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov.

   There were also suggestions that the KGB was behind the assassination attempt against the Pope John Paul II in 1981.
   

   and later it WAS confirmed that the soviets DID try to assasinate the pope..

   oh… and when you all think of us rioting and such, just remember that there are arms caches all over the US. the smuggling of drugs facilitated the ablity to move TONS of military equipment.

   Large-scale sabotage operations have been prepared by the KGB and GRU against the United States, Canada and Europe, as described by intelligence historian Christopher Andrew in Mitrokhin Archive [20] and in books by former GRU and SVR officers Victor Suvorov[21] and Stanislav Lunev, and Kouzminov. [22] Among the planned operations were the following:

   Large arms caches were hidden in many countries for the planned terrorism acts. They were booby-trapped with “Lightning” explosive devices. One of such cache, which was identified by Mitrokhin, exploded when Swiss authorities tried to remove it from woods near Berne. Several others caches (probably not equipped with the “Lightnings”) were removed successfully.[23]
   Preparations for nuclear sabotage. Some of the hidden caches could contain portable tactical nuclear weapons known as RA-115 “suitcase bombs” prepared to assassinate US leaders in the event of war, according to GRU defector Stanislav Lunev.[9] Lunev states that he had personally looked for hiding places for weapons caches in the Shenandoah Valley area[9] and that “it is surprisingly easy to smuggle nuclear weapons into the US” ether across the Mexican border or using a small transport missile that can slip undetected when launched from a Russian airplane [9]
   Extensive sabotage plans in London, Washington, Paris, Bonn, Rome, and other Western capitals have been reveled by KGB defector Oleg Lyalin in 1971, including plan to flood the London underground and deliver poison capsules to Whitehall. This disclosure triggered mass expulsion of Russian spies from London [24]
   FSLN leader Carlos Fonseca Amador was described as “a trusted agent” in KGB files. “Sandinista guerrillas formed the basis for a KGB sabotage and intelligence group established in 1966 on the Mexican US border”.[25]
   Disruption of the power supply in the entire New York State by KGB sabotage teams, which would be based along the Delaware river, in the Big Spring Park.[26]
   An “immensely detailed” plan to destroy “oil refineries and oil and gas pipelines across Canada from British Columbia to Montreal” (operation “Cedar”) has been prepared, which took twelve years to complete.[27]
   A plan for sabotage of Hungry Horse Dam in Montana.[26]
   A detailed plan to destroy the port of New York (target GRANIT); most vulnerable points of the port were marked at maps.[26]
   According to Lunev, a probable scenario in the event of war would be poisoning of the Potomac River with chemical or biological weapons, “targeting the residents of Washington DC”. [9] He also noted that it is “likely” that GRU operatives have placed already “poison supplies near the tributaries to major US reservoirs.” [28] This information was confirmed by Alexander Kouzminov, who was responsible for transporting dangerous pathogens from around the world for Russian program of biological weapons in the 1980s and the beginning of 1990s. He described a variety of biological terrorism acts that would be carried out on the order of the Russian President in the event of hostilities, including poisoning public drinking-water supplies and food processing plants. [29]At the end of the 1980s, the Soviet Union “was the only country in the world that could start and win a global biological war, something we had already established that the West was not ready for.”, according to Kouzminov.
   

   all this stuff facilitates their political ends.
   we no longer have a set of agencies that function

   and of course the population is too buys trying to make up good stories to repalce history.

   think of it. without all this other stuff, his article becomes a white wash of the historical period. later generations will wake up and say “it was those terrorists”, while those that know the history will say “once we had nuclear weapons, taking over a state by military force wont work, so terrirism, false flag, and turning from the inside is the only way”

7. Artfldgr:

   “Brevity is the soul of wit…”

   Not that I disagree with you, but PLEASE a bit of self-restraint. After three complete scroll down clicks, I give up and go on…

   Thanks

8. Sometimes I want to shout out that it is all moot. We are done. Throughout history great powers rise and fall. Our time is over. And there is no one to blame but ourselves. What is to save us if the almighty dollar has lost its appeal? The dollar has been brought down by our own with others in the shadows pulling strings. Perhaps Ace of Spades is correct, even if he is only joking. Why do so many of my fellow Americans want to conduct national suicide?

9. O’Brien’s article is excellent. I was struck by his observation that closed societies, such as USSR and China, have an easier time dealing with terrorism. Two things:

   First, re solutions re Islamic terrorists: it’s important we understand and define what our task is. More influence for citizens; less influence for tribe. That’s our task.

   I consider Islamic fundamentalism to be a type of religious fundamentalist tribe of warriors. Our task is to grow the numbers of citizens in the region. The citizens – appreciating their citizenship and therefore having much to lose – would do the true work of depressing the incentive of the fundamentalist tribal warriors to act against the West. Further, the citizens – appreciating and understanding their citizenship – would make the moral argument that citizens of the West are not attacking Islam via the act of being citizens inside Western societites. More influence for citizens; less influence for tribe. That’s our task.

   Second: OT

   neo wrote that O’Brien was “a man who defied easy Left vs. Right categorizations.” This is surely an accurate statement.

   However, in me (separate from the simple accuracy and fairness of neo’s statement), it activated a personal grudge against those who wallow in the supposed virtue of being “moderate”.

   And it got me thinking: a person who is moderate on any single issue is simply ignorant about that issue. If the person were informed, they would not ascribe their opinion to being “moderate”.

   What of persons who, for instance, hold some left type opinions about some social issues, and some right type opinons about economics, and so forth?

   I use the descriptive terms “left” and “right” all the time. ALL THE TIME. However, in the way I think about it, I could substitute the phrases “those who seek power” and “those who seek truth”. As far as I’m concerned, if a person believes objective truth exists, and if a person is seeking truth, that person is on the “right”. I don’t care where they fall on any social issue, on economics, on foreign policy. If they are seeking truth, they are in my tribe on the right. If the person doesn’t believe objective truth exists; if the person believes “truth” amounts to mere opinion; if the person is, in conversation, seeking to win the conversation (as opposed to seeking to find the truth; if the person’s objective, ultimately, is the accumulation of power (for ultimate purpose of creating some type of fundamental change in society or in governance), than that person is on the left, and they are not of my tribe. And that’s the way I think about it, so far.

   Therefore, whatever opinions Conor Cruise O’Brien held, he appears to me to have been seeking truth, and I’m claiming him for my definition of “on the right”.

   (I wondered if I had written too long a comment, and if it would all fit inside the comment requirements of neo’s blog. And then I remembered, with affection, of course, Artfldgr)

10. br549,

    We are NOT done, unless we believe that to be the case.

    Our time is NOT over. No outside force can overcome us.

    Nor, can the forces of self-defeat. in the end, win.

    Despite the ‘almighty dollar’ having lost much of its appeal, there is no really viable alternative.

    As America goes, so goes the world.

    We shall save ourselves because what’s right with this country FAR outweighs what is wrong with it.

    So many fellow Americans apparently want to commit national suicide because at present they do not see the danger. When things get bad enough, the danger will be apparent to all and then survival will be once again in vogue.

11. Good Ole Charlie, how would you sum up the history to people who wont follow the link, and who dont believe there is such a huge preponderance of stuff?

12. Artfldgr: kamikazes were not terrorists. I discussed the distinction some years ago, here. Their targets were military, and in the context of a conventional declared war. O’Brien is discussing terrorism, and I am making a distinction between terrorists who commit suicide during their acts of terrorism, and those who don’t.

13. This is hardly what we did in 2002, when we took off somewhere else to shoot at some different Muslims who were not in the loop and left the ones that were in Pakistan.

    Not at all true. That idea is a political construct.

    The only interesting question is: Why do you need to believe that?

14. Hmm, only one thing to add.

    There is no such country or geographical area as Palestine. Call it Canaan if you really want – otherwise, it has always been Israel.

    Oh, and Artfldgr? Not saying anything, just that proper punctuation would help. You can’t force anyone to read what you’ve written, but you can make them happier about it.

15. Yes Neo, I think you are right. Kamikazes were not terrorists because their military aims were thoroughly conventional, something which could well be accomplished with a cruise missile today. It seems to me that Mohammed Atta’s aim was not primarily military. It was religious. Mohammed Atta engaged in human sacrifice, in the role of an archaic priest, offering the lives of his thousands of victims as a pure and pleasing sacrifice to Allah so that Mohammed Atta’s sins could be remitted. It seems to me that this is an inversion of the priestly role of Christ.

    I do wish to thank Artfldgr for pointing out serious deficiencies in O’Brien’s essay. I’ll address those points in a later post if time permits.

    If one seeks deeper insight than that offered by Conor Cruise O’Brien one might do well to consider an essay by René Girard published in the August/September 2009 issue of First Things entitled: On War and Apocalypse

    Speaking of Islamic terrorism, Girard writes in part:

    Archaic religion collapsed in the face of Judeo-Christian revelation, but Islam resists. While Christianity eliminates sacrifice wherever it gains a foothold, Islam seems in many respects to situate itself prior to that rejection.

    Of course, there is resentment in its attitude to Judeo-Christianity and the West, but it is also a new religion. Historians of religion, and even anthropologists, have to show how and why it emerged. Indeed, some aspects of this religion contain a relation to violence that we do not understand and that is all the more worrying for that reason. For us, it makes no sense to be ready to pay with one’s life for the pleasure of seeing the other die. We do not know whether such phenomena belong to a special psychology or not.

    We are thus facing complete failure; we cannot talk about it, and we cannot document the situation because terrorism is something new that exploits Islamic codes but does not at all belong to classical Islamic theory. Today’s terrorism is new, even from an Islamic point of view. It is a modern effort to counter the most powerful and refined tool of the Western world: technology. It counters technology in a way that we do not understand and that classical Islam may not understand either…

    We do not experience this reality; we have no intimate, spiritual, phenomenological contact with it. Terrorism is a superior form of violence, and it asserts that it will win. There is no indication, however, that the work that remains to be done to free the Qur’an from its caricatures will have any influence on terrorism itself, which is both linked to Islam and different from it. We can thus put forward the tentative hypothesis that the escalation to extremes now uses Islam as it once used Napoleonism and Pangermanism. Terrorism is fearsome in that it knows how to use the most deadly technology outside of any military institution. Clausewitzian war is an analogy that can make only imperfect sense of terrorism, but it certainly does foreshadow it.

    [The emphasis in bold above and below are mine — Mike.]

    Girard goes on to make another of several important observations, one more of which I’ll introduce for discussion:

    …the Crusades are not as important as Islam thinks. The Crusades were an archaic regression without consequences for the essence of Christianity. Christ died everywhere and for everyone. Seeing Jews and Christians as falsifiers is more irremediable. It allows Muslims to eliminate all serious discussion, all comparison among the three religions. It amounts to not wanting to see what is at stake in the prophetic tradition. Why has Christian revelation been subject to the most hostile and ferocious possible criticism for centuries, but not Islam? There is an abdication of reason here. In some respects, it resembles the aporia of pacifism, which can be a strong encouragement for aggression. The Qur’an would thus benefit from being studied in the same way that Jewish and Christian texts have been studied. I think that a comparative approach would reveal that it contains no real awareness of collective murder.

    By contrast, there is a Christian awareness of such murder. The two greatest conversions, those of Peter and Paul, are analogous: They are one with the awareness of having participated in a collective murder. Paul was there when Stephen was stoned to death. His departure for Damascus immediately followed that murder, which must have affected him terribly. Christians understand that the Passion has rendered collective murder inoperative. This is why, far from reducing violence, the Passion aggravates it.

    Girard’s point about the Passion will require a bit of explaining.

    Islamism seems to have understood this very quickly, but in the sense of jihad. There are forms of acceleration in history that are self-perpetuating. We have the impression that today’s terrorism is somehow the heir of totalitarianism, that terrorism and totalitarianism contain similar forms of thought and ingrained habits. One of the possible threads of this continuity is the construction of a Napoleonic model by a Prussian general.

    The model was later taken up by Lenin and Mao Zedong (referenced by al-Qaeda). Clausewitz’s brilliance lies in his having unknowingly anticipated a law that has become worldwide. The Cold War is over, and now we are in a hot war, given the hundreds, and tomorrow perhaps the thousands, of victims every day in the Middle East.

    The trend toward the apocalypse is humanity’s greatest feat. The more probable this achievement becomes, the less we talk about it…

    Anyway this seems more meaningful to me than O’Brien’s essay which is itself not without virtue. Perhaps others here can provide greater insight… and better editing 😉

16. AVI wrote: Yes, Joseph, we all remember that history where the whole world was determined to really take it to Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Pakistan border, but were prevented from going forward because of the American neocons’ unaccountable obsession with a country that had no ties to terrorist extremism whatsoever.

    Forgive me but I don’t quite know how I should read this. Is the tone sardonic? Is this intended to be read literally? I don’t know. I can’t tell.

    Of course the CIA could find no significant stocks of WMD’s in Iraq after the invasion. For that matter the CIA was and continues to be unable to tell us just what was removed from Saddam’s WMD storage facilities and shipped to Syria by Russian special forces in weeks of truck convoys and air cargo flights. The CIA was unable to find any evidence that Saddam’s government planned the Insurgency as part of its effort to eject the US from Iraq, despite appearances that the CIA interviewed and released many of the principals of that plot. CIA was unable to find the UN-Oil-for-Food Program corruption. The liberated Iraqis did that. It was the US military which captured the Iraq Intelligence Service files during the invasion; IIS files revealing that Saddam was giving substantial support to the pre-9/11 Taliban. Or that those IIS files indicated that Saddam did indeed have a limited working relationship with Al Queda which extended to aiding the February 1993 bombing attack on the World Trade Center. Saddam’s relationship with AQ wasn’t promiscuous and therefore it allowed Saddam to retain the plausible deniability necessary to frustrate the USA in the court of world opinion if AQ should strike the USA with Saddam’s aid.

    One may also recall the December 13, 2001 attack by Lashkar-e-Taiba (part of AQ) on the Indian Parliament. Lashkar-e-Taiba intended to ignite a nuclear war between Pakistan and India. A war in which the US military estimated that there would be around 125,000,000 casualties. Does anyone now believe that such a war in the Winter of 2002 would not likely have collapsed Pakistan and leave a swath of Islamic chaos stretching from Iran’s Eastern border into India. The Bush Administration Neocons walked both Pakistan and India back from the brink of that war. It seems to me that Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Neocons were far better strategic thinkers than the Bush Administration’s domestic critics.

17. Thank you Artfldgr for pointing out the largely absent link to Soviet subversion in O’Brien’s essay, published in 1986 at the height of the Cold War just five months before Reagan pushed the Soviets to the wall at the Reykjavik Summit.

    In his essay O’Brien throws us a bone of sorts when he uses the example of the IRA to conclude that peace negotiations between Israel and Jordan would fail to end terrorism. O’Brien writes:

    Similarly, if King Hussein and Shimon Peres were to reach agreement, it would not be likely to cause any of the Arab terrorist groups to go out of business or forfeit their hard-core support … So the prospects for ending terrorism through a negotiated settlement are not bright, whether or not the terrorists are involved in the negotiations. But the insistence that a negotiated solution can end terrorism actually helps the terrorists. It does so because it places the responsibility for continuing terrorism equally on the terrorists and those they seek to terrorize. The enhanced respectability with which the terrorist is thereby invested gives him a foretaste of success and an encouragement to persevere. This is the opposite of what the dovish advisers desire, but it is the main result of their ill-advised endeavors.

    Do we eagerly welcome O’Brien’s observation of the obvious because he tells us what so many of the cynical Great Game players: the foreign policy Traditional Realists, Neo-Realists, Saudi-philes and Left refuse to admit? Perhaps, but consider that Conor Cruise O’Brien was both an Irish politican and an Irish diplomat. Without doubt Conor Cruise O’Brien knew that the Provs (the Provisional IRA) of the 1980s were Maoists. Without doubt Conor Cruise O’Brien knew that the Trads (the Traditional IRA) of the 1980s were more traditional Soviet/Stalinist Marxists. Without doubt Conor Cruise O’Brien was aware of the IRA history of receiving material and financial support from the Soviet Union. The IRA began to receive financial aid and weapons from the Soviet Union in the early 1920s! It hard for me to imagine that Conor Cruise O’Brien did not know why the Soviets provided such support. Yet Conor Cruise O’Brien raises that possibility once in his essay in his sixth paragraph:

    (c) The terrorist is an agent, or dupe, or cat’s-paw of the other superpower.

    O’Bien then goes on to dismiss this reality as a “stereotype”. He writes:

    These stereotypes serve mainly to confuse debate on the subject. There is no point in arbitrarily attributing motives, nice or nasty, to the terrorist. It might be more useful to look at the situations in which terrorists find themselves and at how they act, and may be expected to act, given their situations.

    And unbelievably O’Brien then uses the IRA as a model for his discussion of terrorism! He writes:

    In what follows I shall bear in mind mainly (though not exclusively) the members of the most durable terrorist organizations of the twentieth century: the IRA (including its splinter groups) and the PLO (including its splinter groups).

    Thereafter O’Brien admits into his discussion only one further reference to state sponsorship of terrorism as he begins to attack Reagan’s soon to be successful challenge to the Soviet Union:

    not only do doves sometimes help terrorists but some hawkish advisers also give inadvertent aid and comfort to the forces they abhor. The combating of terrorism is not helped by bombastic speeches at high levels, stressing what a monstrous evil terrorism is and that its elimination is to be given the highest priority. I’m afraid that the most likely terrorist reaction to such a speech, whether it comes from a President, a Secretary of State, or other important official, is: “You see, they have to pay attention to us now. We are hurting them. Let’s give them more of the same. ” And it all helps with recruitment. A movement that is denounced by a President is in the big time. And some kind of big time is what is most wanted by the aggressive and frustrated, who constitute the pool on which terrorist movements can draw.

    Are we to believe that sinister characters such those in the PLO would response in such a childish fashion?

    Next O’Brien seeks to limit the scope of any American response to terrorism. Note how this corresponds to the European Left’s critique of Pres. Bush’s overthrow of Saddam:

    What applies to speeches applies a fortiori to unilateral, military action against countries harboring terrorists.

    After continuing criticism of Reagan’s Cold War rhetoric O’Brien goes on to propose a superpower consensus. Consider what O’Brien then wrote in the context of the UN Oil-for-Food Program corruption and UN’s failure to effectively enforce its numerous resolutions regarding Saddam’s Iraq and ongoing efforts to contain the illegal Iranian nuclear program:

    Such consensus could take the form of a joint warning that any country harboring terrorists would no longer be allowed to invoke its sovereignty as a protection against international intervention. Once superpower agreement had been reached, that warning could be embodied in a mandatory resolution of the Security Council.

    Finally O’Brien reaches his goal, emasculation of American Cold War foreign policy in relation to the Soviet Union and subordination of American foreign policy to European sensibilities

    The second alternative is to provide clear and consistent political and moral leadership in this matter to U. S. allies and the rest of what is called the free world. That would require the United States both to abandon completely its support for the contras in Nicaragua and to accept, without the present reservations, the authority of the World Court.

    .

    [Emphasis in bold are mine — Mike]

18. Mike, yes it is facetious.

    artfl – you sidestep the complaints about rambling. It is not merely length. Many people have given you credit for bringing useful information forward. It is presentation that is lacking. I assume you are attempting to persuade. If the information were in a foreign language, would you not translate so that the reader could understand? This is a milder version of the same problem. Many people who you might persuade simply pass your comments by. You are responsible for presentation.

    You wonder how to communicate that there is a great deal of supporting evidence for your points? Hmm, lots of other people seem to manage it, many of whom are less intelligent than you are. It strikes me as an attitude rather than ability problem. You believe you should not have to organise your essays because the information is so important that we should put up with whatever you send us.

    I would reply: if the information is so important, then put it in a form that people will attend to it.

    I consider it an arrogant lack of respect for the reader when a writer will not take the time and effort to put the information into a structure. I doubt you are arrogant. Take care not to appear so.

19. kamikazes were not terrorists.

    actually they were. the point in WAR is terror. so ALL people in a war are terrorists to the opposing side.

    its this FALSE distinction that creates a special case of individual, when the only real difference is monetary backing and number of people.

    if osama could raise and train an army without being stopped till it was done, he would do that.

    but he cant. so he doesnt. the issue is ECONOMIC, and tactical… while ideology may be impetus and reason and excuse, it doesnt change the goal in any way..

    its a false dichotomy in a spectrum of tactics that makes a spcial case for enemy combatants of the impoverished kind. (which may clue you in on why the left helps them. not only for the fact that they are usually socialist, culturally dissruptive, but that they cant meet one on one, so they are hegelian victims).

    the japanese would have attacked mainland USA if they could.

    the proof is in the hot air balloons that they sent up. they ended up killing a family in washington state.

    kind of a VERY cheap V2 rocket equivalent. with the idea of setting fire to all the pacific northwest and california.

    if osama won afghanistian, you can be sure that the terrorists would end up being state officials.

    or does anyone forget that ahamadinijad was a terrorist who took americans hostage in their embassy?

    how does the kamikaze, whose purpose was to terrorize troops the same way tsun tsu deescribed end up not being terrorists?

    in order to do that, one would have to say that ALL of the military of japan terrorized, beheaded, tortured citizens, but the nobal warriors of the devine wind, were special?

    The Nanking Massacre or Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, refers to a six-week period following the Japanese capture of Nanking, then capital of the Republic of China, on December 9, 1937. During this period, hundreds of thousands of civilians were murdered and 20,000-80,000 women were raped [1] by soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army.[2][3]

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    Eyewitness accounts of Westerners and Chinese present at Nanking in the weeks after the fall of the city state that over the course of six weeks following the fall of Nanking, Japanese troops engaged in rape, murder, theft, arson, and other war crimes. Some of these accounts came from foreigners who opted to stay behind in order to protect Chinese civilians from harm, including the diaries of German John Rabe and American Minnie Vautrin. Other accounts include first-person testimonies of the Nanking Massacre survivors, eyewitness reports of journalists (both Western and Japanese), as well as the field diaries of military personnel. An American missionary, John Magee, stayed behind to provide a 16 mm film documentary and first-hand photographs of the Nanking Massacre.

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    On 19 December 1937, Reverend James M. McCallum wrote in his diary :

    “I know not where to end. Never I have heard or read such brutality. Rape! Rape! Rape! We estimate at least 1,000 cases a night, and many by day. In case of resistance or anything that seems like disapproval, there is a bayonet stab or a bullet… People are hysterical… Women are being carried off every morning, afternoon and evening. The whole Japanese army seems to be free to go and come as it pleases, and to do whatever it pleases.” [35]

    On March 7, 1938, Robert O. Wilson, a surgeon at the American-administered University Hospital in the Safety Zone, wrote in a letter to his family, “a conservative estimate of people slaughtered in cold blood is somewhere about 100,000, including of course thousands of soldiers that had thrown down their arms”.[36]
    
    

    terrorizing the population was what they did. the kamikaze sought to strike terror into the hearts of GI soldiers by show of self control and force.

    “Let me recount some instances occurring in the last two days. Last night the house of one of the Chinese staff members of the university was broken into and two of the women, his relatives, were raped. Two girls, about 16, were raped to death in one of the refugee camps. In the University Middle School where there are 8,000 people the Japs came in ten times last night, over the wall, stole food, clothing, and raped until they were satisfied. They bayoneted one little boy of eight who have [sic] five bayonet wounds including one that penetrated his stomach, a portion of omentum was outside the abdomen. I think he will live.”[37]
    

    honorable men and combatants who sought not to terrorize civilans.

    “On December 13, about 30 soldiers came to a Chinese house at #5 Hsing Lu Koo in the southeastern part of Nanking, and demanded entrance. The door was open by the landlord, a Mohammedan named Ha. They killed him immediately with a revolver and also Mrs. Ha, who knelt before them after Ha’s death, begging them not to kill anyone else. Mrs. Ha asked them why they killed her husband and they shot her dead. Mrs. Hsia was dragged out from under a table in the guest hall where she had tried to hide with her 1 year old baby. After being stripped and raped by one or more men, she was bayoneted in the chest, and then had a bottle thrust into her vagina. The baby was killed with a bayonet. Some soldiers then went to the next room, where Mrs. Hsia’s parents, aged 76 and 74, and her two daughters aged 16 and 14. They were about to rape the girls when the grandmother tried to protect them. The soldiers killed her with a revolver. The grandfather grasped the body of his wife and was killed. The two girls were then stripped, the elder being raped by 2-3 men, and the younger by 3. The older girl was stabbed afterwards and a cane was rammed in her vagina. The younger girl was bayoneted also but was spared the horrible treatment that had been meted out to her sister and mother. The soldiers then bayoneted another sister of between 7-8, who was also in the room. The last murders in the house were of Ha’s two children, aged 4 and 2 respectively. The older was bayoneted and the younger split down through the head with a sword. (…)”[42]

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    “The seventh and last person in the first row was a pregnant woman. The soldier thought he might as well rape her before killing her, so he pulled her out of the group to a spot about ten meters away. As he was trying to rape her, the woman resisted fiercely…The soldier abruptly stabbed her in the belly with a bayonet. She gave a final scream as her intestines spilled out. Then the soldier stabbed the fetus, with its umbilical cord clearly visible, and tossed it aside.”[43]
    
    you can read more here:
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre#The_massacre

    this would be like saying the pilots of the wermacht were the good guys who were honorable, only because they too committed suicide by plane.

    the difference was that their planes could reach civilians.

20. How Geologists Unraveled the Mystery of Japanese
    Vengeance Balloon Bombs in World War II

    web.mst.edu/~rogersda/forensic_geology/Japenese%20vengenance%20bombs%20new.htm

    During the Second World War the Japanese conceived the idea of fashioning incendiary bombs and attaching these to balloons which were released with easterly wintertime jet stream winds above 30,000 feet to float 5,000 miles across the north Pacific. The idea was to have these devices explode over the forested regions of the Pacific Northwest and initiate large forest fires that would hopefully divert U.S. manpower from warfighting in the Pacific theater to combating fires at home.

    The U.S. government muzzled the media about making any mention of the balloons in fear that whoever was producing them might be encouraged to send more. On March 5, 1945 a minister’s wife and five Sunday School students on a fishing trip were killed by one of the grounded balloons near Bly, Oregon while attempting to pull it through the forest, back to their camp. These were the only casualties of the balloon bombs during the war and the victim’s relatives were provided with a special death benefit after the war ended (in March 1946). The American public was made aware of the balloons after these tragic deaths, but word of their detonation never filtered back to the Japanese.

    to sent incendiaries on the jet stream to the US is pretty much the same as hitler sending V2 Rockets to england…

    neither could aim, and the end result didnt care about ‘target’. civilians were just as good a target.

    and if nanking wasnt enough…
    then how about the korean comfort women. that was surely terrorising the korean population, no? or where these women military?

    “forced by the Imperial Japanese Army to repeatedly provide sex for Japanese soldiers throughout Asia are said to number between 80,000 and 200,000. Many of the victims were underage at the time, and either died in despair or suffered health impairments. These women, who suffer from mental and physical pain, not to mention social isolation and prejudice, are now seeking an official apology from the Japanese government and individual compensation as a measure to rehabilitate their honor.”

    Singapore. Japanese soldiers bayonet 300 patients and staff of Alexandra military hospital 9 Feb 1942. British women had their hands behind their backs and repeatedly raped. All Chinese residents were interviewed and 5,000 selected for execution.

    no civilians terrorised? yes?

    A construction crew of 1,200 mostly Idaho youths, captured when Wake Island fell, were shipped to Japanese prison camps. Five were beheaded to encourage good behavior on the trip. The Japanese decided to keep 100 of the civilian contractors on the island to complete the airbase, which became functional in 1943 . When US Navy planes attacked the island, the Japanese commander executed the civilians.

    not combatants… CIVILIANS…

    Those Dutch accused of resisting Japan or participating in the destruction of the oil refineries had arms or legs chopped off. 20,000 men were forced into the ocean and machine gunned. 20,000 women and children were repeatedly raped, then many were killed.
    

    Dutch Borneo. The entire white population of Balikpapan was executed.

    Java. The entire white male population of Tjepu was executed. Women were raped. (Survivors of USS Edsall (DD-219) are beheaded.)

    [must have been a military society where EVERYONE was born a soldier…]

    Thailand. 15,000 military prisoners and 75,000 native laborers died building a railroad between Bangkok and Rangoon. Bridge Over the River Kwai.
    

    the bridge is still there, its a tourist site.

    Twenty five thousand Chinese in villages through which the US flyers escaped were slaughtered in a three month reign of terror.

    as american airmen fled, they deputized every man woman and child… so these were not civiilians either.

    Milne Bay. In their few days at Milne Bay the Japanese had displayed remarkable brutality. Fifty-nine local people were murdered by the Japanese, often being bayoneted while held prisoner, and in many cases being tortured or mutilated. Not one of the 36 Australians captured by the Japanese survived. All were killed, and some were badly mutilated.

    16Feb42. British evacuees from Singapore on the island of Bauka surrendered to a Japanese detail. The 26 soldiers were executed, the 22 Army nurses were marched into the sea and machine gunned, the twelve stretcher cases were bayoneted. — Story told by the surviving nurse, who, though shot, was washed ashore.

    personally…. if kamikaze could reach american cities, they would have flown into them.

    to give them a pass cause they cant reach civilians is not truthful or even reflects the whole of their war effort.

    [you can also clip them for bringing their families with them to war! you can see videos of women leaping off of cliffs because they were terrorized as to what the americans would do… after all, look at what THEIR people did, and they were describing them as WORSE]

21. As of today…

    the club is coming together…

    CHINA, RUSSIA, FRANCE, ISLAM…

    they all have decided to dump the dollar as an exchange currency for oil.

    since the US doesnt manufacture, and we have deficits, we will not be able to buy oil.

    they made this very prominent.

    a postage size article, on the seam in the daily news, page 14….

    we are being outmaneuvered.

22. “actually they were. the point in WAR is terror. so ALL people in a war are terrorists to the opposing side.”

    Jeez, you’re sounding more like a comic book charater all the time.

    “Everything in the world is motivated by fear. The oinly reason people get married is fear of dying alone. The only reason people have children is fear of not leaving a legacy. Everything comes down to fear, and by spreading around giant batches of ‘fear gas’ and robbing banks in a Halloween costume until Batman beats me up and throws me in jail, I intend to prove it.”

23. here is an image of the grand mufti reviewing troops during wwii

    s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/EG-AB561_schwam_G_20090924140559.jpg

    and here is Hezbollah today
    s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/EG-AB562_schwam_G_20090924140806.jpg

    Hitler, Stalin, and the Mufti, later mao.

    how much control over the people of the globe do those four create? take away hitler..
    how much of the worlds population is represented by soviet states, islamic areas, and chinese?

    how many know that the koran was re-written and that the originals were thought to be destroyed during the bombings of germany.

    the whole point is that islam went through a similar kind of evolution that liberation theology is attempting with christianity. (controlling all controlling power).

    its is WELL known that they became the pawns of nazi germany… hitler was not racist as todays neo nazis are… he didnt try to exterminate the arabs, north africans, and so on… they are only racist if you think that the religion of judaism makes a race… but from marx quote above in the long piece you can see that they are just following the same plan…

    methods change, goals remain.

    however to hear the quotes as to ararats rants, and to read the grand mufti, is to read the same person created by the same ideology and religion.

    its not like this all was just sponaneous…
    its not like we dont have archive records describing how they did it
    its not like we dont have defectors
    its not like we dont have other corroborating informaiton.

    its just that we have no will for the truth.
    or to quote a movie:
    “we cant handle the truth”

    online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574400532495168894.html

    The mufti orchestrated the 1920/1921 anti-Jewish riots in Palestine and the 1929 Arab pogroms that destroyed the ancient Jewish community of Hebron. An early admirer of Hitler, Husseini received Nazi funding–as did Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood–for his 1936-1939 Palestinian revolt, during which his thugs killed hundreds of British soldiers, Jews and also Arabs who rejected his Islamo-Nazi agenda. After participating in a failed fascist coup in Iraq, he fled to Berlin in 1941 as Hitler’s personal guest. In the service of the Third Reich, the mufti recruited thousands of Muslims to the Waffen SS. He intervened with the Nazis to prevent the escape to Palestine of thousands of European Jews, who were sent instead to the death camps. He also conspired with the Nazis to bring the Holocaust to Palestine. Rommel’s defeat in El Alamein spoiled these plans.
    

    anyone want to do a search on obama and the muslim brotherhood? see what friend and such pop up?

    [edited for length by neo-neocon]

24. Nonetheless in some of your examples Artfldgr their military objectives were much the same as those is a Medieval, barbarian, Islamic or Roman siege for example when plague ridden bodies were catapulted into a besieged city or when POWs and families of defenders were crucified by the besiegers before the walls of a besieged city. The cruel mistreatment of POWs and conquered peoples by Islam is no different than the other gratuitous Japanese war crimes you describe. Compare the Rape of Nanking with Islam’s mistreatment of conquered peoples as provided for and “morally justified” in the Hadith. The vile trophy photographs of the humiliated gang rape victims of Nanking that infantry men in Japanese Imperial Army sent home to Japan demonstrate that their motivation was similar to that off the early Jihadists who, Dr. Patricia Crone explains, were motivated by an opportunity for rape. Expecting the certainty of death the Kamikaze fought to frustrate the enemy. However, the Japanese Imperial infantry men hoped to survive and fought for base motive and Imperial “glory”. As Girard argues Islamic suicide bombers exchange their lives in the nihilistic hope of enjoying mass murder unto Nietzschean genocide.

    “actually they were. the point in WAR is terror. so ALL people in a war are terrorists to the opposing side.” In Girardian Theory, this happens as a disintegrating violence distressed culture approaches the stage of Monstrous Doubles on its journey to apocalyptic violence.

25. “… were prevented from going forward because of the American neocons’ unaccountable obsession with a country that had no ties to terrorist extremism whatsoever.”

    In fact there is and was a significant body of evidence, both very clear, as well as murky but clearly implicating, linking Saddam’s regime to “terrorist extremism”; Salman Pak, one prime example: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/gunning/interviews/khodada.html

26. “actually they were. the point in WAR is terror. so ALL people in a war are terrorists to the opposing side.”

    Jeez, you’re sounding more like a comic book charater all the time.
    

    so what your saying is that the point of war is cupcakes and marshmallow guns like in the movie bugsy malone?

    thats why they (and us) made weaponized anthrax… cause its such an efficient weapon? or because deseases so terror?

    the purpose ot the V2 rocket was to deliber mail. not to terrorize the british… right?

    then why did the germans put noise makers on their bombs. bombs dont wistle normally…

    of course, if you follow the link i put above, there is a picture of a woman who went through the japanese hospitality.. you can see how they left her naket with her legs spread, stomach gutted, and objects shoved into her vagina.

    they didnt bury them cause they thought it was the new modern art. like piss christ.

    william tecumsa sherman said war is hell…
    but the whole quote says, war is hell and i intend to make it so… thats cause he had the warm fuzzies.

    of course the removal of genitals and placing them in the mouth of the dead is another modern art treatment.

    and we cant forget RED TERROR…

    that the WHOLE POLITICAL system was geared towards control by terror and fear… right?

    and of course obama isnt going to waste a crisis. and we all know crisis brings security, and safety and causes us to relax and think clearly.

    we know that people become marxist and communists because they completely love their fellow man and dont fear the wealthy would do what they would do had they the money.

    but lets here what greater men than i say on this subject.

    [and remember, we meet here and discuss things becasue we are not afraid of what will happen later in america, right?]

    “The majority of people are timid by nature, and that is why they constantly exaggerate danger. All influences on the military leader, therefore, combine to give him a false impression of his opponent’s strength, and from this arises a new source of indecision.”
    – Karl von Clausewitz
    

    those timid by nature live in fear

    “The conqueror is always a lover of peace; he would prefer to take over our country unopposed.”
    – Karl von Clausewitz

    “The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.” — Sir Winston Churchill

    such behavior makes others FEAR the people who have audacity to do that. (read klauswitz on audacity)

    “Cruelty has a human heart, And jealousy a human face Terror, the human form divine, And secrecy, the human dress” william blake

    and dont forget the one who these people love to follow… (along with clausewitz, tsun tsu, liu biao, and lots of others, which most people dont even know their names).

    The Prince
    by Nicolo Machiavelli
    Concerning Cruelty And Clemency, And Whether It Is Better To Be Loved Than Feared
    http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince17.htm
    http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince17.htm

    this tells you what obama will do next along with his friends… (as it was in these other petri dish states).

    Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with.

    so if he cant be loved AND feared, he will eventually have to go with being hated and feared.

    Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you. And that prince who, relying entirely on their promises, has neglected other precautions, is ruined; because friendships that are obtained by payments, and not by greatness or nobility of mind, may indeed be earned, but they are not secured, and in time of need cannot be relied upon; and men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.
    

    of course it goes on… but its what rulers do…
    there are no rulers in republics…

    and remember the marxist socialists are EXPERTS IN FEAR AND TERROR. their state was born in fear and terror and has been maintained by it!!!!!!

    we didnt build thousands of nuclear arms because we think red bears are cuddly.

    Red Terror
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror

    PAY VERY CLOSE TO THE REASON THEY GIVE FOR RED TERROR…

    Purpose of the Soviet Red Terror
    The Red Terror was claimed to be introduced in reply to White Terror. The stated purpose of this campaign was struggle with counter-revolutionaries considered to be enemies of the people.

    that is, red terror was their way of exterminating the kind of people that come to tea parties!! and those who made too much money… and those who were inconvenient…

    [edited for length by neo-neocon]

27. Artfldg: I don’t have the time to read all of your remarks, but on skimming them I just want to reiterate that kamikazes were not terrorists. “Aiming at terrorizing” is not the same as being a terrorist. I think your definition is too broad. If the word “terrorist” has any meaning at all as describing a distinctive group (which I believe it does), kamikazes are not included. And in this post, it is that particular more-narrowly-defined phenomenon that I am discussing.

    That is not to say that terrorists don’t have things in common with other categories, such as Kamikaze pilots. The kamikazes, for example, did want to strike terror into the US troops they attacked. Kamikazes also were featured in a part of the war in which the Japanese needed to get the most bang out of their buck, as it were, and a single man could do a lot of damage (this is also something they had in common with terrorists). In addition, I am in agreement that many groups of terrorists around the world are financed, aided, and abetted by other groups and nations, such as the Soviets. Arafat most assuredly was.

28. JOURNALISTS IN RUSSIA, 1993 TO 2009Deaths and Disappearances

    http://journalists-in-russia.org/journalists/
    you can sort the list and see and judge for yourself.

    20 pages…

    163 homicides
    79 accidents
    15 missing

    its interesting to read and look at the locations and the stories.

    9 homicides were in cars…

    Kagirov car was ambushed in chechnya

    Yevloyev was shat while in police custody (in the head while being transported from the airport)

    Alishaev two men walked up to the car and opened fire

    Razmolodin contract killing

    Kaverin found in car dead, three shots to the head

    Litvinov killed with zaitsev in a car, they ran cable tv

    Khropov found in car at side of road, bullet in head

    Yaroshenko was killed (beaten to death) in a stairwell. the state says he slipped.

    then there were the high profile cases.
    politskaya… she got a few bullets to the head in her doorway. most are killed near their homes.

    and outside of journalists you have a kgb defector poisoned with radioactive polonium from a nuclear reactor…

    and how about Yushchenko? leader of what ex soviet state? he was poisoned with dioxin..

    New tests reveal Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko’s (search) blood contains the second-highest level of dioxin poisoning ever recorded in a human – more than 6,000 times the normal concentration, according to the expert analyzing the samples.

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    The 50-year-old reformist candidate, who faces Kremlin-backed Viktor Yanukovych (search) in a repeat runoff on Dec. 26, fell ill after having dinner with Ukrainian Security Service chief Ihor Smeshko and his deputy Volodymyr Satsyuk on Sept. 5. Yushchenko reported having a headache about three hours after the dinner, and by the next day had developed an acute stomach ache.
    

    see how left liberals support the cause? cant winh by debate, win by other means. which means used depends only on what you can get away with. if acorn could get away with assasination, they would.

    this photo shows before and after shots of him
    story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=1778&e=2&u=/041211/481/fra10312111550

    The picture combo shows Viktor Yushchenko in file photos dated March 28, 2002, left, and Dec. 6, 2004, right. The Ukrainian opposition leader and presidential candidate’s mysterious illness that scared his face was caused by dioxin poisoning, doctors said Saturday Dec. 11, 2004, in Vienna, Austria. (AP Photo/Viktor Pobedinsky/Efrem Lukatsky)

    and that was not to cause fear and control outcomes by other means.

    if we dont take fear seriously, we will live under it.

29. “so what your saying is that the point of war is cupcakes and marshmallow guns like in the movie bugsy malone?”

    Because if I happen to think there are more motivations in war than just “sow terror,” then obviously I must think it’s a Care Bear hug-a-thon.

    The wonders of binary thinking!

30. I just want to reiterate that kamikazes were not terrorists. “Aiming at terrorizing” is not the same as being a terrorist. I think your definition is too broad. If the word “terrorist” has any meaning at all as describing a distinctive group (which I believe it does), kamikazes are not included.

    the kamakazees were part of a distinctive group called the japanes army whose use of terror was a policy. which was why they were tried for war crimes.

    i would suggest reading the history of the word, its etymology.

    maybe its definition has changed in the modern world to suit the left liberal story line rather than historical validity? after all, abortion is now a social good, and not eugenics… and elder care assisted death is not euthanasia…

    terrorism
    http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=terrorism&searchmode=none

    1795, in specific sense of “government intimidation during the Reign of Terror in France” (1793-July 1794)

    all terrorists have government involvment. those who act alone to blow something up are not terrorists. timothy mcveigh caused terror, but was not a tarrorist, sicne he was not backed by any state.

    that is not true of ALL others is it?

    the left has broadened the meaing, so they can define it as THEY wish. i keep going back to the meanings in dictionaries and such rather than personal ones.

    “If the basis of a popular government in peacetime is virtue, its basis in a time of revolution is virtue and terror — virtue, without which terror would be barbaric; and terror, without which virtue would be impotent.” -Robespierre, speech in Fr. National Convention, 1794

    General sense of “systematic use of terror as a policy” is first recorded in Eng. 1798.

    Terrorize “coerce or deter by terror” first recorded 1823

    the SYSTEMATIC use of terror…

    so scaring people is not terrorism.

    it has to have state support
    it is using terror in a systematic way

    General sense of “systematic use of terror as a policy” is first recorded in Eng. 1798.

    Terrorist in the modern sense dates to 1947, especially in reference to Jewish tactics against the British in Palestine — earlier it was used of extremist revolutionaries in Russia (1866); and Jacobins during the French Revolution (1795) — from Fr. terroriste.

    well isnt it convenient that AFTER wwii, it was reformed as a way to describe jews and the british who helped create isreal.

    and as i said, russia was born in terror…
    as was france..

    a single man cant commit an act of terrorism..
    he can terrorize a population, but he cant commit terrorism.

    so your right… the definitino doesnt really mean much today… in fact its definition is so broke we cant call a branch of a state army whose use of terror was applied systematically from civilians to soliders. note that the geneva convention tried to limit even acts of terrorism against soldiers too.

    The tendency of one party’s terrorist to be another’s guerilla or freedom fighter was noted in ref. to the British action in Cyprus (1956) and the war in Rhodesia (1973). The word terrorist has been applied, at least retroactively, to the Maquis resistance in occupied France in World War II (e.g. in the “Spectator,” Oct. 20, 1979).
    

    and as you move forward it becvomes muddier and mddier.

    the terrorist caould not be george washington..

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_terrorism
    do note how they keep saying, the modern definition of…

    well the japanese were not working under the concept of a modern definition.

    [edited for length by neo-neocon]

31. Because if I happen to think there are more motivations in war than just “sow terror,” then obviously I must think it’s a Care Bear hug-a-thon.

    terror is not a motivation of war, its a tactic of war. its a tool..

    however i was not being serious…

    you however are not being honest in painting my sarcasm as a serious binary mode of thought.

    talk about stupid to try, concieve, and execute.

    how did it go?

    your statement was that i thought that the world ran on fear… i dont… but i do think that modern marxist politics and the things that come from it, ARE related to fear, since the state was born in it, formalized it, practicves it, researched it, and experimented no their own and other people to perfect it.

    i also think that the world runs on sex, greed, selfishness, and other things that are much more positive (like love).

    however, i think that fear overpowers them all.

    and so, is the focus of a power dialectic, called socialism.

    as far as reciprocity, you cant fight a bear with a cream puff. so entangling with such you end up being more like them than they become like you.

    or hasnt history shown that?

32. Artfldg: I intend for this to be my last communication on the subject—I just don’t have time to go into it more closely.

    Kamikazes were not terrorists. Whether they would have been had they had the resources to fly to the US is not my concern; I am dealing with what they actually did. In the past, I’ve done a fair amount of reading and research on the subject. In summary, they were members of the military and their targets were military.

    Likewise, the fact that other people use the word “terrorist” like Humpty Dumpty, to mean whatever they want it to mean, is another issue (I happen to agree that they do this). Terrorists target civilian populations in undeclared wars.

    Other types of terror target other populations, but they are not terrorism, no matter what people say to further their own purposes. Saboteurs, for example, are not the same as terrorists. And many governments use terror as a tool in wartime, but that doesn’t make them terrorists. In addition, many governments encourage and support the actual terrorists.

    Obviously there is overlap in methods and in goals. But I was discussing O’Brien’s view of terrorists and what makes them tick.

33. I’m with Neo. Kamikaze tactics violate many of the standards or warfare (e.g. safe sanctuary, not deliberately targeting medical personnel, and so on). As such, trying for war crimes is appropriate. But as long as they confine their attacks to military targets, they are not terrorists.

    Terrorists, by contrast, specialize in attacks against civilians. (They avoid military targets whenever possible, because the military can and does fight back. Terrorists are, by and large, cowards; that’s why they so frequently hide their faces.)

    The goal of terrorists is not to win a war by unconventional means, as the kamikazes tried to do, but to effect political change, by so terrorizing the civilian population as to make the status quo intolerable. At that point, radical restructuring of government, or even the overthrow of the current regime, can start to sound reasonable… which is what the terrorists want.

    (And when they’re caught, the terrorists demand the protections of the society they’re trying to undermine. As I said, they’re cowards, and dishonorable to boot.)

    Kamikazes are reviled, on the whole, by military personnel, and rightly so. But terrorists, as I have described them, make even the kamikazes pale by comparison — for they do not strike at soldiers by unconventional means, they strike at the heart of civilized society.

    Other than the fact that some terrorists share some tactics with kamikazes, I would not put them in the same category.

    respectfully,
    Daniel in Brookline

34. fine.. then neo we disagre…

    Terrorists target civilian populations in undeclared wars.

    you say that makes a terrorist…

    and i say that it requires state help, which the difference between civilian and others is made. that is you cant target a civiilan population unless your a combatant making a distinction between acceptable targets and not.

    and so my point (for the others not you neo) is to correct that defintition which is new modern and makes any one who does ANYTHING to a person who is not employed by the gobvernment a terrorist!!!

    if i shoot a person in a robbery, i am a terrorist by neo’s definition (when applied) if the person does not work for the state.

    i say tha such a person can terrorize, but until a state funds them and helps them they are not terrorists. that the key was the state…

    tim mcvey was not funded by the state, and he attacked federal employees… technically he attacked non civilians… and would be a terrorist.

    under my definition he was not a terrorist. he was a man who wanted to terrorize people to get an end, but had no state helping him, and so could not in his own be an ISM.

    ISMs are state things… no?

    ISTS are people things… no?

    the problem is that if we use the wrong definition we are all criminals!!! which is why the definition has been shifted to include independent people who are protesting the state!!!!!!!!!!!

    when the protestors who are getting help from the state, not being prosecuted for their violence and such, WOULD perfectly fit the old definitions and so make their lauded by the left acts a crime and not civil disobedience (for the reason that our system affords no means of change within it).

    in your definition, you can stretch it to not include people who were ordered by terrorisms leaders to commit an act of terrror against soldiers.

    when a muslim fills up a car with explosives and runs that at a military checkpoint, they are not terrorists, they are soldiers… right?

    and this is where the new definition is now meaningless.

    it moves the determination into the realm of opinion and power and outside empirical reality and conditions.

    it makes realities judgements arbitrary and dependent on who has the pwoer to declare that 2+2 = 5

    my definition would make kamikazes the means of a terrorist state to acheive ends.

    my definition would make liberal protests that damage property, people, and do harm, acts of state sponsored terrorism.

    my definitino would not make the tea parties acts of terrorism.

    the key that is being removed is the state.

35. as long as they confine their attacks to military targets, they are not terrorists.
    

    then al queda outside of 9/11 is not a terrorist organization… and timothy mcvie was a combatant (he attacked non civilians).

    its that simple..

    the definition has to fit what your definining, and the modern definition wants the state to be god, and god is not a terrorist. so what god does can never be terrorism (so red terror is not terror but justice!).

36. Artfldgr: whatever are you talking about? Al Qaeda has had many non-military targets, and not just in the US. In Iraq, for example, they preyed very heavily on civilians.

    Oh, and I do need to add something to my definition of terrorists: for political purposes that are connected to some larger movement. For example, a mass murderer might be killing civilians in order to terrorize a population, but that’s usually done without a political purpose connected to a larger movement. Charles Manson, for example, wanted to sow terror and he actually had a very strange and idiosyncratic political plan and purpose, connected with starting a race war and then becoming a leader in the resultant chaos (described in Bugliosi’s book Helter Skelter). He’s on the cusp, but I don’t think he’s a terrorist because his group was unaffiliated with any larger movement (thank goodness!).

    Definitions are always flawed, of course. But I think they can be useful in clarifying a particular phenomenon.

37. Dan,
    your definition salutes the modern left idea of what war is, and promotes the modern fallacy that ignores clauswitz famous maxim.

    that war is politics by other means.

    this is the modern fallacy…

    as long as they confine their attacks to military targets, they are not terrorists.
    

    using your definition, dresden was an act of terrorism, and tim mcvie was an act of heroism.
    (and isnt that how the left sees things? it coms from the sublte change to the definition).

    dresden was an act of terrorism by the UK and USA against the german people to do what?

    but to effect political change, by so terrorizing the civilian population as to make the status quo intolerable. At that point, radical restructuring of government, or even the overthrow of the current regime, can start to sound reasonable… which is what the terrorists want.
    

    i would say compared to history, completely anihilating a city of civilians and war stuff by firestorm would be tring to win a war by unconvential means by terrorizing the civilians.

    attacking conventional forces with unconventional means, like the kamikaze, the attack is not limited to the action where it happens.

    it results in soldiers writign home. the mind concept that they other side will fight harder than you. it is attacking the civilians back home through the people up front. which is why its a war crime!!!

    
    All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.

    you guys are arguing tactics and i am talking strategy, and definitions that allow you to understand whats there.

    the whole set of tactics and doctrines comes out of KNOWING about war from those that do it, not those that discuss it and never do.

    how long would wwii have lasted if the germans V2 rocets had a 1:300 kill ratio? (like the guys hitting trade towers).

    For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.

    Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

    by these defiitions there are no terrorists in afghanistan…

    which is the logic behind lawfare…

    and these are the definitions that support such logic.

38. an interesting read for all would be
    Soldiers of the dragon: Chinese armies 1500 BC-AD 1840

    and read…
    Mao Zedong and the Chinese Revolution
    “The Long March,” by Edgar Snow

    it will give a peak into the military stuff that the east uses and knows.

    just as you know vietnam, they know a huge number of battles and histories that in the west we are completely ignroant of. and these other things form the basis of acts, which the west renames to suit them and their framework of understanding, where a different set of actions is permitted and not permitted. .

    No time was to be lost. The bridge must be captured before enemy reinforcements arrived. Once more volunteers were called for. One by one Red soldiers stepped forward to risk their lives, and, of those who offered themselves, thirty were chosen. Hand grenades and Mausers were strapped to their backs, and soon they were swinging out above the boiling river, moving hand over hand, clinging to the iron chains. Red machine guns barked at enemy redoubts and spattered the bridgehead with bullets. The enemy replied with machine-gunning of his own, and snipers shot at the Reds tossing high above the water, working slowly toward them. The first warrior was hit, and dropped into the current below; a second fell, and then a third. But as others drew nearer the center, the bridge flooring somewhat protected these dare-to-dies, and most of the enemy bullets glanced off, or ended in the cliffs on the opposite bank.

    Probably never before had the Szechuanese seen fighters like these – men for whom soldiering was not just a rice bowl, and youths ready to commit suicide to win. Were they human beings or madmen or gods? Was their own morale affected?

    Did they perhaps not shoot to kill? Did some of them secretly pray that these men would succeed in their attempt? At last one Red crawled up over the bridge flooring, uncapped a grenade, and tossed it with perfect aim into the enemy redoubt. Nationalist officers ordered the rest of the planking torn up. It was already too late. More Reds were crawling into sight. Paraffin was thrown on the planking, and it began to bum. By then about twenty Reds were moving forward on their hands and knees, tossing grenade after grenade into the enemy machine-gun nest.

    Suddenly, on the southern shore, their comrades began to shout with joy. “Long live the Red Army! Long live the Revolution! Long live the heroes of Tatu Ho!” For the enemy was withdrawing in pell-mell flight. Running full speed over the remaining planks of the bridge, through the flames licking toward them, the assailants nimbly hopped into the enemy’s redoubt and turned the abandoned machine gun against the shore.
    

    the east makes little distinction between civilians and military… why? because most militaries in history are not volunteer (americas uniqueness again). their troops are conscripts, and so attacking civilians is attacking future warriors, or attacking those who would breed more warriors if the time is long enouhg.

    right now, mothers and fathers who had children 18 years ago, ended up producing new soldiers who were 10 years old when afghanistan war started… now they are ripe like fruit.

    and from their perspective, they are not tricked to go out, but just as these chinese soldiers committed suicide to help the COLLECTIVE, they were special.

    if you saw how terrorists prepare, and how kamikazies prepare, and how the soldiers in wwi prepared suicide missions.

    none of it is different…

    however, in the story above the terrorists created maos red china.

39. It is hardly encouraging to resolve when your partner appears to be bereft of common sense and the capacity for cooperation.

    NATO members had no sense in Afghanistan. Do you know why it’s such a piss pot 8 years after the US successfully kicked the Taliban out?

    It’s cause of your ‘allies’ not wanting to fight. They’re partying at head quarters while the grunts, Canadian/British/American/Whoever is allowed to fight by their political masters, gets to die at the boonies in Afghanistan.

    Trying to reverse this issue and point the looking glass at the US, who does the super majority of the heavy lifting, is an indication of your own inherent lack of capability. It’s not an indication of any lack on our part.

40. Artfldgr: kamikazes were not terrorists.

    I would and have made the same distinction as Neo.

41. the kamakazees were part of a distinctive group called the japanes army whose use of terror was a policy. which was why they were tried for war crimes.

    Too many degrees of separation. The Japanese wind of god forces were not tried for war crimes. That’s like saying elements of Abu Ghraib were prosecuted, and since those elements were part of the US military and the US military is thus connected to Bush and RUmsfeld, that Bush and Rumsfeld are war criminals.

    It is too many degrees of separation.

    Terrorists and pirates are outlaws. They do not wear uniform. They fight for no recognized state or open chain of command, military or civilian. They cannot be held responsible because their chain of command is cellular, not hierarchical nor even transparent.

    By conflating outlaws with legitimate soldiers that do wear uniform, you start hammering away at the ethical and legal protections provided to the US military should some foreign body decide that we had used ‘tactics designed to instill terror’.

    In case you hadn’t noticed, a lot of acts in war can be said to have done that.

42. if i shoot a person in a robbery, i am a terrorist by neo’s definition (when applied) if the person does not work for the state.

    We’re talking about political influence. If you robbed somebody for money or personal vendetta, that’s not terrorism. That’s crime. If you robbed somebody to make sure they voted for your candidate, or didn’t vote at all, that would be terrorism. Which is what the KKK did, although the preferred ropes and trees, not robbery.

43. Artfldgr: what’s your opinion on straw-man arguments?

    DiB: as long as they confine their attacks to military targets, they are not terrorists.

    ad: using your definition, dresden was an act of terrorism, and tim mcvie was an act of heroism.

    Nonsense. I did not say that all attacks on civilians are terrorism. (If A, then not B; it does not follow that B is true because A is not. For example, bald men never need hair dye; that doesn’t mean that all men with hair do need hair dye. That’s a classic error in Logic 101, which I assume you’re clever enough not to make.)

    Nor did I say anything which has any bearing on Tim McVeigh (who attacked a government building, killing a great many civilians, with the stated intent of effecting political change). And you clearly have no idea how I define a hero, although it wouldn’t take you much digging to find out.

    The firebombing of a city during wartime may be seen in retrospect as a war crime. But it’s not an attempt to get the locals to change their system of government; it’s an attempt to terrorize the government into surrendering, and thereby end the war. This is not terrorism.

    Terrorism can get the government to change, yes, and acts of war can strike terror into the hearts of civilian populations. But your attempts to conflate the two don’t make sense. (Was it terrorism when the United States blanketed Hiroshima with warning pamphlets before dropping the Little Man bomb? It may have caused terror, but the intent was to minimize civilian casualties, while simultaneously destroying part of the Japanese war effort and demonstrating a fearsome new weapon. I would not call those pamphlets an act of terrorism, and I don’t think you would either.)

    Your efforts to put words in my mouth do not do your argument credit, sir.

    respectfully,
    Daniel in Brookline

44. Ymarsakar: I believe you and I are on the same page here.

45. here is the reason for the new definition… as i said, it has a purpose.. and when you dont test the new def, over the old def, you dont see the loopholes that can be exploited.

    Black “News Analyst” Labels Police as Racist Terrorists

    Marc Lamont Hill, the far-left hip-hop professor and paid Fox News Channel analyst, has a record in support of cop-killers. And now we have learned that he went on “The O’Reilly Factor” to defend black militants who held a March vigil in honor of Lovelle Mixon, a suspected rapist with a lengthy criminal record, who murdered four Oakland police officers. Hill said on Fox News that the activists, many of them from a communist organization, were protesting “police terrorism.”

    Recall that Hill claims that cop-killer Assata Shakur, who fled to Communist Cuba after escaping from prison, is innocent. Hill has also declared his support for Mumia Abu-Jamal, another convicted cop-killer, who is on death row. Hill called him a “freedom fighter” and “political prisoner” devoted to “black liberation” and announced that the convicted killer would be contributing to Hill’s website as a weekly contributor. “Welcome Brother Mumia!!!!” Hill said.

    The defense of the protesters in the Mixon case adds to the growing concern about this Fox News contributor, who is paid handsomely by the channel to appear on various Fox News Channel shows and is supposed to provide the appearance of fairness and balance. But is cop-killing a matter that requires two sides of the issue?

    http://www.aim.org/aim-column/fox-news-analyst-labels-police-racist-terrorists/

46. Control the language you control the people.
    definitions matter…

47. Conor Cruise O’Brien who as ambassador to the UN from Ireland had to sit between Israel and Iraq (and got a first hand look at the Middle East conflict) once said “Well it’s possible that the Israelis might be their own worst enemies as the Left like to claim, however if they are, they’ve beaten out some pretty stiff competition for that coveted title”.

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>