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Thursday, October 30, 2003 |
 Question: why didn't we take the same decentralized "tribal warlord" approach that worked relatively well in Afghanistan and apply it to Iraq?
2:38:53 PM 
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Are attacks against leadership targets (assasinations or decapitation strikes) terrorism? For example: the motar and rocket attacks against the Al Rashid hotel in Iraq (Wolfowitz got a scare there recently, but was lucky the majority of the rockets in the attack didn't fire) and the attacks the US (the use of Predator RPVs in Afghanistan and Yemen) and Israel (cell phone bombs, helicopter, etc.) make against terrorist leaders. Historically, leadership targets have been largely off-limits. Of course, nation-states don't recognize the leadership of terrorist groups as leadership in the historical sense of the word (if so, what are they?).
11:43:22 AM
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WSJ. The Fed has goosed the economy to a roaring 7.2% growth rate in the third quarter. Unfortunately, this recovery is essentially jobless as companies run scared.
8:48:59 AM
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Rick Klau found that Kevin Bacon is not the most connected actor.
8:07:42 AM
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Here is another question: can guerrilla warfare be exported internationally? If Mao could have taken the war to Japan, would it have been terrorism? If an Afghan Mujahideen group could have taken guerrilla sabotage operations to Moscow, would it have been terrorism?
8:03:15 AM
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Are the attacks against US troops in Iraq acts of terrorism or guerrilla warfare? To answer this, here is something to think about.
If you read the works of Mao, Che, and others on this topic, they would call these attacks a valid form of geurrilla warfare. Why? To borrow from Martin Van Creveld: war is only considered war when each side is at risk of destruction at the hands of the other. Any form of lethal violence that doesn't risk mutual destruction is considered slaughter and not warfare. 9/11 was slaughter. The lives of the attackers were never really at risk except by own hands. It fits with our sense of what the word terrorism means. In Iraq, attacks against US military targets puts the attacker at risk.
The US government would call these attacks terrorism. Why? Modern states have had a legal monopoly on violence (but not one in actuality). In their eyes, any lethal violence that is not within the framework of a nation-state to nation-state struggle is terrorism. Modern states have also extended the definition of terrorism to include non-lethal attacks on property. In this way, "terrorism" is currently used as a word of approbrium by nation-states for all forms of unlawful violence.
12:26:17 AM
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© Copyright 2004 John Robb.
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