black hole, the great cloaca of footnotery

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Wars with armies taking territory will include atrocities but it would confuse things to call them terrorism. So leave out the crusades and the conquests that pushed the Ottoman empire to the doorsteps of Hunagary. The use of terror tactics also differ from ethnic clensing where a majority does atrocious things to a minority. So leave out the numerous little holocausts by which Arabs drove sometimes ancient indigenous Jewish communities from many Muslim lands after WWII. Terrorist acts by but mostly against Israel began with and before its statehood. These acts wax and wane like skirmishes with civilian casualties...they are more like war between badly matched neighbors. The IRA was the chief source of terrorist acts in the UK until last July. The ETA has been accused of recent bombings in Spain that may have been by Muslim groups but they are still in struggle for Basque independence. The assassination games betweed Mossad and various underground Palestinian paramiltaries which sometimes spilled blood outside of Israel or Palestinian territory by precisely targeting combatants is really war and not terror. Black September airplane hijackings got the most headlines and peaked in 1969. Nationalism was at the root of many terrorist acts that helped drive colonial powers out of their former colonies until the 1980s. BUT Planned, stealthy acts of random murder against westerners by Muslims on western soil has no history I could find prior to the 1972 Munich masacre, and there, Israel was the target. Abu Abbas' attack on the Achille Lauro in 1985 could be considered to have happened on Itallian territory. A truck bomb leveled the US Marine barracs in Lebanon in The first act of Islamic terror on US soil was the bombing in the garage under the WTC which was being planned as early as 1992 and is loosely connected to Osama Bin Laden via Sheik Omar's contacts with Bin Laden. Oklahoma City i '95? McVeigh probably didn't like Arabs any more than he liked ATF. An attempt to bring a bomb into the the US around new years 2000 landed Ahmed Ressam and a group of Algerians in jail. Arrests in the US and Canada of persons who were suspected of planning terroris acts have been on the increase since 2000. Only since the invasion of Iraq have perpetrators been Muslims who were also natives or citizens of the target countires: UK in the news but also a college lecturer in Florida and Padilla.

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I republished on the 14th.
On the 16th, if you pay for it [and not that Tom is hurting for the cash], you can read Tom Friedman saying:

...though, the Democratic mainstream is nowhere near as dovish as critics depict. Truth be told, some of the most constructive, on-the-money criticism over the past three years about how to rescue Iraq or improve the broader “war on terrorism” has come from Democrats, like Joe Biden, Carl Levin, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Bill Clinton.

...

Not only is there no honest self-criticism among Republicans, but — and this is truly contemptible — you have Dick Cheney & Friends focusing their public remarks on why Mr. Lamont’s defeat of Mr. Lieberman only proves that Democrats do not understand that we are in a titanic struggle with “Islamic fascists” and are therefore unfit to lead.

Oh, really? Well, I just have one question for Mr. Cheney: If we’re in such a titanic struggle with radical Islam, and if getting Iraq right is at the center of that struggle, why did you “tough guys” fight the Iraq war with the Rumsfeld Doctrine — just enough troops to lose — and not the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force to create the necessary foundation of any democracy-building project, which is security? How could you send so few troops to fight such an important war when it was obvious that without security Iraqis would fall back on their tribal militias?

Maybe I should submit my resume' to the NYTimes?