Ken Hanly wrote:
>
> Surely it is quite a different tactic to use suicide as in hunger strikes
> and to commit suicide as a human bomber inflicting casualties on many
> innocent people. As for urban uprisings by leftists, some of them may be
> termed suicidal I suppose but most of the examples seem to be from years ago
> not now. I was thinking of suicidal terrorism. Is that a predominant tactic
> among Turkish leftists or many other leftists? Marxist influenced parties
> obviously will reject any such tactic. It is a type of infantile
> ultra-leftism in most instances. Although hunger strikes might be effective
> in certain conditions.
>
> Cheers, Ken Hanly
>
What about a soldier in combat who exposes himself to certain death in order for the enemy machine gun to reveal itself. This tale was told over and over again in fiction and journalism during WW2? There is even a song about it -- "The Ballad of Private Roger Young."
Bush's (and the media's) claim that this was an act of war does make the agents combatants, not "terrorists," hence it is proper to apply to them the same criteria that is applied to combatants -- e.g., the pilots in the various "thousand-plane raids" on German cities that the headlines continuously celebrated back in the '40s. Those raids were directed strictly against the civilian population.
Carrol