Re: Just more bullying?

[snip mike's letter]

Kendall did an excellent job in his response, so I'll avoid further point
by point.

But I'll chime in on the curiosity front: What's up Mike? :)

Less snarkily, I do wonder if you (mike) have a line on the self-defense
stuff. I spent some time yesterday trying to invent a scenario where
bombing Afghanistan...even with the ostensible aim of hitting the Taliban
*or* bin Laden...could remotely be justified as self-defense...

...and "Well we couldn't actually defend ourselves so we thought we'd do
*this*." doesn't seem to work.

Given that it's perfectly possible for the Sept. 11th attack to be
completely illegitamate *AND* for the US response to be entirely, or
mostly, "more bullying", it's not clear that your entire line of rebuttal
isn't off-kilter.

Indeed, isn't a fairly common line that goes, "A bullying response is
exactly what the attackers hoped to provoke." Given all recent (and not so
recent) US history, it's seems unreasonble to be very charitable toward
our actions.

Oh! Finally, it's pretty hard to see how even our wretched policies
morally justify attacks against civilians. For example, I don't see
anything in the general laws of war that justify Hamas' suicide attacks
against Israeli civilians. That every nigh every "freedom fighter" group,
especially those we've supported, does it doesn't make it right although
it *does* make us hypocrites for opposing it in our enemies. Worse, using
that as a pretext for 1) not solving the problems and 2) retaliating in
like ways to a far larger degree.

I say this *while* finding it very hard to straightforwardly oppose the
right of armed resistence. But armed resistence shouldn't entail
abandoning the laws of war.

Cheers,
Bijan.