That statement doesn't refute the claim of moral equivalence. The targets that Al-Qaeda hits are of the same basic nature that the US has hit in recent wars. Except I don't think Al-Qaeda has blown up hospitals or deliberately destroyed the enemy's water facilities. Not yet, anyway. If you carpet bomb a bunch of villages like the US has it's pretty obvious that your'e going to kill a bunch of civilians. The same is true of ramming planes into skyscrappers. Both sides claim that they "don't target innocent civilians" (only the bad guys do that) but it's pretty obvious that the actions they carry out will kill large numbers of ordinary people.
> Even some, like the anarchist
> Chomsky were okay with a police action under UN auspices. Did most
> anarchists feel that way?
Not really; it depends on what you mean by "police action."
> The reasons for a "police action" seem obvious,
> to prevent another atrocity which would surely come if nothing was done.
This is the same logic used by Bin Laden to justify attacking the US.
> In a broadcast just after September 11, bin Laden deputy Suleiman
> Abu Gheith warned Muslims living in the West not to reside in tall
> buildings or fly on airplanes, because the rain of death was not
> going to stop.
This is no different then State Department warnings to US citizens to get out of a country 'cause they're going to bomb it.
> And yet it has.
The reign of death is still going. But it's victims mostly aren't Americans so I guess they don't count.
-- Joe R. Golowka JoeG at ieee.org Anarchist FAQ -- http://www.anarchyfaq.org
"According to the libertarian litany, if an industry or an institution is making a profit, it is satisfying "wants" whose origins and content are deliberately disregarded. But what we want, what we are capable of wanting is relative to the forms of social organization. People "want" fast food because they have to hurry back to work, because processed supermarket food doesn't taste much better anyway, because the nuclear family (for the dwindling minority who have even that to go home to) is too small and too stressed to sustain much festivity in cooking and eating -- and so forth. It is only people who can't get what they want who resign themselves to want more of what they can get. Since we cannot be friends and lovers, we wail for more candy." - Bob Black