Oh, cut out the bloody moral equivalence

Look, Singabloodypore, George W. Bush is not the world's biggest terrorist. Let's stop taking our talking points from Chomsky and be a bit more precise about our terms here. Terrorist organisations like al-Qaeda, the LTTE (that's the Tamil Tigers), Jemaah Islamiyah, and (previously) the IRA purposely set out to kill large numbers of non-combatants to advance a political agenda. When conceived as a political tactic employed by transnational, non-state actors against states, terrorism aims to weaken people's confidence in their governments' ability to protect them, and, in doing so, pressurise governments into submitting to the terrorists' demands. Terrorism can also be employed by states can against their own citizens (Saddam's Iraq); in such cases, terrorism aims to coerce citizens into compliance with state authority.

For all its screw-ups in Iraq, the US military does not go out of its way to deliberately kill Iraqi civilians, unless it considers them to be combatants. While inevitably and tragically, many civilians have died as a result of the US's actions, these losses in no way mark the US out as a terrorist state, or its President as a terrorist. To equate George W. Bush -- whom I have no fondness for -- with the likes of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Saddam Hussein, and other genuine terrorists trivialises the significance of terrorism and deflects attention from the real problems faced by the US military in Iraq today, and those of Iraqi civilians struggling to make ends meet.
Posted by kungfuzi at 6:50 pm |