[steveeboy]

I am sorry to be imprecise in my post.

Of course I was speaking about wounded no longer in the battle.

So, the guy that gets nailed and is clearly wounded and is crawling away from the truck is what I meant...

And, I am not sure about your claim that aircraft may kill all wounded on the ground merely because they cannot accept their surrender.

Would it be okay to strafe a military hospital?


Also, more language issues, when did ALL Iraqi combatants become "terrorists"?

If they are fighting on the battlefield, they are combatants, if they are blowing up innocent men. women, and children in order to make a poltical point rather than for some military objective they are "terrorists."

Probably better to just use the term "soldier," "insurgent" "guerilla" or, my preference, "enemy" for those actually on the battlefield engaged in military operations.


While I certainly do not think we need to have our apache piltos giving out sweets and smiley faces to bad guys, I am also a bit uncomfortable portraying all Iraqis engaged in resistance to US forces as "terrorists."

I do not think it is a good tactic to portray all Iraqis as "terrorists" worhty of extermination. Such an attitude will make the war tougher rather than easier in my view.

Were the roles reversed, I am quite sure many freepers would be fighting for the USA. We would not be "terrorists," we would be rebels, guerillas, the resistance, or something.

I know this is just language games, but it seems obvious-- to me at least--that at this point there are a lot more fighters in IRaq that are just nationalist locals pissed off and fighting the occupation.

They are nto all "terrorists," "regime remnants," "criminals," etc.

This refusal to deal with this reality on the part of the Bush Administration is dangerous in my view. It smacks of the sort of denial that was so evident among policy makers during Vietnam.

Whenever I read any reports from the front these days, it seems that one gets far more respect for the guerillas on the part of the GIs.

To deal with Iraq effectively, politicians need to quit deluding themselves or trying to scam the populaiton by portraying all of the resistance as the acts of Al Queda, Zarqawi, etc.

[68skylark]

Well, you raise a perspective we don't often get here at FR. While you and I might not change each others minds about the situation in Iraq, I'm glad we can be civil.

To me (and to most people here) I think there's a very obvious thread of connection that runs between incidents like the 9/11 attacks, bombings in Kashmir and Bali and Israel and Madrid, bombings of Russian airliners and Russian schools, kidnappings and beheadings and car bombs in Iraq, and attacks on our forces of liberation in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think most of us here feel pretty comfortable using the word "terrorist" to describe the perpetrators.

I guess there are others who would say, "No, some are terrorists but some need to be called by other names -- like resistance or insurgents or militants or freedom fighters." That's the Reuters argument. I don't think I'm going to agree with that.