The military journalists consider Health Care, for example, to be the military's greatest enemy at the moment.
How amusing. We pacifist libertarians see it the other way around. If the shit-for-brains government would stop spending a hundred billion dollars a year on a war that was started for fraudulent reasons and is not likely to accomplish anything positive (unless you count pushing Al Qaeda's base of ops into a not terribly hostile country with nuclear weapons, and pissing off the entire Muslim population of this planet, as "positive") they'd have lots of money to spend at home.
Obviously you'd know flying in uniform gets you bumped from coach to first class. Never had one flight where the airliners didn't bump me up. It's their way of thanking the soldiers.
I've flown coach with lots of men and women in uniform.
That doesn't make any sense. Targets without value are not useful for extortion.
They have no
strategic military value. Killing a couple of hundred thousand civilians and leaving the rest to suffer painful lingering deaths--especially the children--is a great way to demoralize the civilian population.
Nonsense. The (stated) political aims of terrorist groups are frequently blandly mainstream (and protean, indicating their superficial nature, but let's leave that aside for now), and the use of terrorism in pursuit of them demonstably the least effective way to advance them. Terrorism is not some kind of rational Clausewitzian warfare, or even a misconstrual of such by ill-informed or irrational actors. Political utility really is incidental to the phenomenon.
Yes we all know that now, and I suspect it's more true now than it was in WWII and in the days of the IRA.
Why not? What's the difference between your description and regular warfare, other than the involvement of explicit state actors?
The definition of terrorism says nothing about the status of the actors. They can be official military personnel or any other type of fighter. It's the
targets that matter. Attacking military targets is war. Attacking civilian targets is not always terrorism, but it's not war. The WTC was terrorism; the Pentagon was war.
Where did "success" figure into your definition?
It didn't. It was just ironic, and terribly sad, that it was successful. From then on, every two-bit terrorist on earth can say to his recruits, "Hey, it worked for the United States. So it can work for us." My country has become a role model for everyone from the IRA to the PLO.
And since when were Hiroshima and Nagasaki without tactical or strategic value?
Obviously they had their share of war plants, but no more than any other cities of comparable size. There were only two atomic bombs in existence in the whole world at that time. Those two cities did not have enough value as military targets to drop those two bombs on
them!
And where have you demonstrated that those attacks were intended to send messages to the populace, rather than the political class directly?
Well I was a little too young to overhear any discussions at the time. But the few cogent analyses I have read, by people who had access to some of the participants, say that. They said that the Emperor did not have a strong personality and had no control over the military leaders, and that the military leaders had worked themselves into a frenzy of imperialist honor, believing that they would betray their constituents if they surrendered. Since there would never be any pressure from above, it was up to the U.S. to generate pressure from below. By demonstrating to the Japanese populace that they were up against a new kind of enemy who had
absolutely no sense of honor and would do anything to win, the U.S. changed the rules and made it possible for them to consider the taboo subject of surrender.
Hogwash. Japan was going to surrender one way or the other; the only question was only when and on what terms.
Reasonable people disagree. Perhaps you're right. I have found the arguments I cited persuasive. Every culture has its streak of irrationality and that was Japan's.
I have certainly seen more than one estimate that without the nukes, the war would have dragged on for many years and taken roughly 75 million more casualties, before Japan finally surrendered. This would have MORE THAN DOUBLED the death toll from that war.
If Japan was really ready to face annihilation instead of surrendering, then by definition they wouldn't have surrenderred. Annihilation by nuclear bombardment would be no worse than annihilation by incendiary bombardment and land invasion; actually it would probably be preferable.
It's a lot easier to maintain the illusion that you're going to win in a conventional war. When your enemy starts dropping city-busters on you without really even coming close enough to shoot at, you suddenly have to face annihilation as a real possibility.
