zero 0000 wrote:
Another problem with the word "terrorism" is that the number of cases that are really clear-cut and unarguable is not so great. The extreme cases that most people here are giving as examples are not really representative.
By avoiding a contentious, ill-defined word you don't have to deal with the serious problem of defining the limits that distinguish between act that are and are not terrorism.
I guess most of us will agree that deliberately blowing up a bus full of schoolkids is terrorism. What about a bus full of uniformed soldiers? (I heard some of you ask "ours or theirs?"; shame on you :-) What about a bus full of uniformed soldiers except for one schoolkid? Or a bus full of schoolkids except for one armed soldier (who isn't there just to protect the schoolkids)? What about a 50-50 mix?
Does anyone here have a mathematical formula describing where the border between terrorism or not lies? This is not a concocted example. Anyone who rides busses in Israel knows that there are often uniformed (and even armed) soldiers taking the bus from one place to another. Or, from the other side, Israeli assassinations done from the air kill on average about the same number of bystanders as intended victims.
By mixing military populations with civilian ones you can provide a more effective shield to protect the military from attack by people who would be moral enough to avoid civilian casualties. Saddam Hussein and Milosevic were both reputed to have unsuccessfully used this tactic; they anticipated that their attackers would be moral people.
Ec