There is more to it than that. It must take place outside of the context of a "normal war". The blitz on London was not, in my mind, terrorism. Terrrorism must also be some form of blackmail. "Do what we want or more civilians will die."
> ... It
> doesn't imply anything about who does the terrorizing. Are the US-backed
> Contras terrorists?
I think you mean "were". Anyhow, my understanding is that goal of the Contras was to take over the levers of power. They were not trying to blackmail the government into doing as they wish, they were rather trying to become the government. That makes them rebels, not terrorists, no matter how dirty their methods were.
> ... Are the Syrian-backed FPLP terrorists? Are the
> Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorists? Are the Pakistani-backed Taliban
> terrorists?
No, the Taliban were not terrorists. They may have harbored terrorists but as far as I know, their organization did not itself perpetrate any attacks on non-afghani citizens.
> ... In every case you have governments directing the action;
> puportedly autonomous terrorist organizations are being used to further
> government aims. The overwhelming majority of terrorist attacks are
> government-sponsored.
I'm sorry, you haven't proven that. Even ignoring my complaints above, you haven't addressed McVeigh, the FLQ, the Northern Irish, the Basques, .... There are probably dozens of other groups I haven't even heard of.
> ... Terrorism is sometime war by other means, sometimes
> psyops, sometimes armed propaganda, but whatever the case it's an integral
> part of many states' military/intelligence arsenal, the principal being the
> U.S. A corollary to this is that terrorism is tightly controlled and the
> chance that independent operators can get through the surveillance net is
> minute.
What are you implying?
> (...)
> || Countries that choose to leave the American-lead
> || secular capitalist club (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan) are even more
> || dictatorial and impoverished than those (Turkey, Egypt) which are pals
> || with the US. Therefore I see no evidence that a withdrawal of American
> || power from those regions would lead to a better life for the people
> || there and an end to terrorism.
> (...)
> Yeah right, how about Salvador, Guatemala, and Saudi?
The Guatemalan war ended in 1996. Friends of mine got married there recently. I hope to go visit soon.
The Salvadoran war ended in 1992. Its biggest problem is natural disasters like Hurricane Mitch and the recent earthquakes.
> ... Do the Saudi religious
> police have softer batons than the Taliban and do they chop off heads and
> hands more humanely?
Saudi Arabia is one of the few remaining US-backed dictatorships in the world. This is without doubt a shameful fact. Nevertheless, life under the Saudis is much, much better than life under the Taliban was. Women work and go to school. Furthermore, if I was George Bush, I'm not sure what I would do to help democracy along in Saudi Arabia. The major opposition parties are Islamist, not democratic.
> ... How about what happened to Nicaragua when it tried to
> go its own way; wouldn't a lot of Nicaraguans be alive now if US power had
> kept its bloody fingers out of there?
It is easy to drag up dirty stories from the cold war years. We should never forget the shit that happened back then but it is not representative of modern day American policy. Since the end of the cold war, the US has encouraged (or at least not stood in the way of) the emergence of electoral democracy in:
* Indonesia
* East Timor
* Nigeria
* Guatemala
* Salvador
* the Philippines
* various Eastern European countries
* ...
> ... Maybe you've never heard that Iran and
> Iraq were once democratic, until the CIA redesigned them? And I guess
> Indonesia really made it big after slaughtering 1/2 million CIA-blacklisted
> commies and installing the Suharto dictatorship? Were the majority of
> Jakartans suffering from TB, subsisting on a bowl of rice per day and
> washing in open sewers or was that my anti-US eyesight that was playing
> tricks on me?
I won't deny any of that. But how much does the world have to change before you admit that the world is changing?
Lemme guess, the US is all-powerful when it comes to perpetrating evil but the good things that have happened since the end of the cold war have had nothing to do with the US. It is merely powerless to stop them.
After years of liberal agitating in favor of East Timorese independence, East Timor is independent. The US gets the blame for the years of domination but none of the credit for the independence. The US "owns" the UN but takes no credit for the UN-sponsored transition government.
Nose. Spite. Face.
Paul Prescod