[WikiEN-l] Sep 11

Fri Jan 16 01:41:09 UTC 2004

Toby Bartels wrote:
>Well, what /was/ the purpose?  Given the NY attacks, terror is likely.
>As for civilian deaths, remember the infamous Gulf War "collateral 
>damage". Was that a terrorist attack by the United States armed 
>forces? 

No for three reasons: 1) the intent was not to terrorize the civilian 
population, 2) very few people call it that, and 3) by definition governments 
cannot commit terrorism. One reason why terrorism is often seen as being 
worse than atrocities committed by governments, is that there is no clear 
thing to retaliate against when it is committed. At least in the Cold War we 
could rely on the concept of mutually assured destruction to keep the Soviets 
from nuking us (and vice versa). We cannot rely on that for terrorist acts 
since the organizations the perform terrorist acts do not have nearly as much 
to loose as a nation performing the same act would. 

>Actually, I know people that claim that the Gulf War /was/ terrorism!
>But we're not going to put that into the article title.

And rightly so since that violates our common name naming convention. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)