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Reply To: | The philosophy, work & influences of Noam Chomsky |
Date: | Thu, 27 Aug 1998 11:34:10 -0700 |
Content-Type: | text/plain |
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C. G. Estabrook writes:
>> "Same tactics"? Did we deliberately target innocent civilians?
>
> Actually, we did. As in Clinton's bombing of Baghdad, dropping
>cruise missiles on inhabited areas has to be called deliberate targeting
>of civilians. Or one could say that in each case a target (the embassy,
>the factory) just happened to be surrounded with civilians. In both cases
>the bombers would rather not kill civilians, but were willing to do so.
Are you suggesting that there were legitimate *non-civilian* targets of
the embassy bombings? Please tell us who they were. I notice you excised
my reference to news reports that a second plant was not targeted
precisely because of the civilian casualties that would result. Was that
because the fact was inconvenient to your posture of easy moral outrage
and the facile equivocation of bombing an embassy with taking out a nerve
gas facility? I also note your dragging in the Baghdad bombing. Do you
feel so foolish making these facile equivocations that you need to
introduce irrelevancies to distract attention from their absurdity? I
also notice that no one on the Left seems to want to discuss the Afghan
strikes. Why is that? Would you be striking moral poses if the reprisals
had only included the Aghan bases? Your absolutist position suggest you
would. So why don't you?
Your definition of "deliberate" drains the term of nearly all meaning. No
one not wholly intoxicated by his own piousness would equate *targeting*
200+ civilians in a bombing, with unavoidable civilian casualties (10, I
think, at last count) in the pursuit of saving vastly more numerous
civilian lives down the road.
>
>> If self-defense is terrorism, the definition is meaningless.
>
> One can call 75-100 cruise missiles on foreign countries
>self-defense in the way the Nazis claimed the invasion of Poland as
>self-defense.
Uh-huh. Didn't take long for the Hitler analogy to be deployed, did it?
And Poland was sponsoring terrorist bombings of Nazi Germany? And Germany
attacked only those sites occupied by the (nonexistent) terrorists? Do
you really want to continue making such foolish analogies?
>
>> Chomsky is willing to risk that thousands of civilians, US or otherwise,
>> will get VX dumped on them while we spend years trying to bring these
>> people to justice?
>
> If we kill all the foreigners (except those working for us), we'll
>run no risk of that problem...
Nice example of rhetorical hand-waving in lieu of a direct answer. If
genocide was our goal, why didn't we carpet bomb Khartoum? Stick to the
original question, or I'll simply conclude that you have nothing
intelligent to say.
If this kind of silly argument is what I am in store for, I'm not going
to bother replying further.
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