[quote]JohnGullick wrote:
I’m Gonna add that I also think its idiotic how caught up in the rhetoric of government people get. Terrorists are not governed by the Geneva convention not because they are so reprehensible as to be completely outside juristiction therefore you can do as you please with them, they are not governed because the Geneva convention was written for land armies! IRA terrorists (who were funded by predominantly American organisations if you care to remember) were tried by the Crown Court and afforded full rights, the Lockerbae bombers were tried in Holland, and again afforded full rights. [/quote]
This is the difference between treating a matter as a criminal matter and treating a matter as a war. The two are different, and must be so. One of the worst ideas of the 20th century has been the “War Crimes Tribunal”, a bastardization of both that serves the purposes of neither.
While it may have made sense to try individuals for certain crimes in the criminal system, it makes no sense to fight a war against terrorists according to the principles of a criminal trial.
This is not the case. The Geneva Convention did not cover terrorists because the convention started as a treaty between western governments, aimed at “civilizing” conflicts between armies. It fully contemplated excluding people hiding in civilian populations – spies can be executed immediately, sans trial. As I posted above, the Geneva Convention is both a carrot and a stick – it rewards fighting according to its precepts by extending its protections to those who do so. It is not meant simply as a list of laws to govern only one side of a conflict. In that way, it functions much like a trade agreement – or any agreement between countries.
Derrida himself would have been very proud of that attempt at deconstruction of the term “terrorist.” Academics can waste many trees [or pixels] arguing about the subtle nuances one could extract from it, or whether this little difference or that small discrepancy makes it apply – kind of like lawyers at a trial arguing about whether the specific parts of the definition of a certain crime are committed. Yet, to play on that analogy, it’s usually pretty clear that some crime was committed, whether it was murder in the first or second degree or what have you.
Your paragraph above attempted to obfuscate the fact that the “insurgents” in Iraq are bombing civilians, kidnapping and executing civilians, and hiding in civilian populations by focusing on what the precise definition of “terrorism” is. All well and good to discuss, but whether or not all the academics can agree on who is a terrorist and who is a freedom fighter [and lets be frank – the disagreements on the definition usually arise because one side or the other of the debate doesn’t want to include a particular group, whether it be the Palistineans, the Israelis, or whoever], it’s fairly clear the terrorists in Iraq are using terrorist tactics – whether they also mix in guerilla tactics and principles seems beside the point to me. Anyone specifically targeting civilians and hiding among civilians is a terrorist.
But wait, what of Sherman in the Civil War? What of the American Revolution? This seems to me to be a temporal problem – we are analyzing the behavior of the forces in Iraq fighting under the principles we have today, not looking back to whether the fighters of the Civil War or the Revolutionary War met the standards of today. The Roman Army was pretty brutal too, but I find that equally inapplicable to this analysis. All those were prior to the Geneva Convetion and modern (post WWII) ideas concerning minimizing casualties among non-combatants.
So, I find it completely unproblematic to refer to the Iraqis who are employing car bombs, suicide bombs, hiding among civilians and kidnapping and executing civilians as terrorists. They will be terrorists irrespective of how much guerilla fighting they throw into the mix, because they use the tactics of terrorism against the civilian population of Iraq.
