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Originally Posted by OnyxCougar
I absolutely LOVE this quote:
These are terrorists - guerilla fighters working from concealment. They do not play by the articles of war, or the Geneva Conventions, or anything else. They cannot, if they want to win, and it is a damned fool that expects them to.
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Nobody in a small army fighting a larger one, from our founding fathers to the Viet Cong, ever won a war by standing up and going toe-to-toe. However, fighting 'dirty' against soldiers is not the same as deliberately attacking civilians.
Any irregular force that doesn't wear uniforms and blends with the population is utimately labeled "terrorist" by their opponents, but this cheapens the word. Terrorism is a set of actions that indicate a war against the civilian population that the terrorists are supposedly trying to 'liberate'.
War is based on fear and violence, but there still remains some effort to temper these with rules of conduct. Some of these rules as they apply to tactics are quickly dicarded by insurgents. Only an idiot fights when outnumbered.
The larger force can also discard rules, and in some cases commit 'war crimes' and atrocities. The bombing of
Guernica by the Germans on behalf of Franco is used as one example. There has also been debate about the Allies bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Were these target chosen for strategic importance or to terrorize the enemy?
The above are examples of actions taken at the srategic level and do not even account for the actions of individual soldiers, squads, and platoons. Whether in war or occupation, abuses have occurred.
My Lai in Vietnam and
No Gun Ri in Korea are two examples of harassed troops striking out at civilians. IMO, My Lai was more egregious since it is pretty obvious that infants and three-year-olds are not disguised insurgents.
From
Country Joe's Place
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The names of the deceased are followed by their age and sex. A brief tally shows that 50 of the people were three years old or younger, 69 were between the ages of four and seven, 91 were between eight and twelve, and 27 were in their seventies or eighties. The list was provided by the Embassy of Vietnam in Washington, D.C., in response to a request by Trent Angers, author of The Forgotten Hero of My Lai: The Hugh Thompson Story.
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The justification for shooting civilians is usually:
1) There are enemy in an area designated as a free-fire zone, and troops would be sacrificing their safety to go in and refine their targets.
2) The civilians are deliberately harboring enemy mixed with the civilians.
3) The civilians are supporting the enemy even though no actual enemy can be found.
In this way, the insurgents, by harassing the soldiers, have caused the soldiers to react by shooting civilians, helping to solidify support for the insurgents among the populace. In war, only one measure of success is in kill ratios. If you kill a single soldier, you have denied the enemy one soldier. If you wound a soldier, you have denied the enemy one soldier and whatever resources are needed to care for that soldier. If you can goad your enemy into committing an atrocity, you may gain the support of hundreds or thousands of civilians.
Terrorists have a different aim. They hope to brutalize the population into submission. In the case of Iraq, where they are terrorizing the same population they are looking to for support, this will hopefully end up backfiring on them.