"Smithers" wrote in message
...
"Ed Huntress" wrote in
:

"Nicholas Anthony" wrote in message
...

"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...
"Nicholas Anthony" wrote in message
...

Putting words in peoples mouths is wrong thing to do. Making
conclusions
as
such is wrong too. I am fed up with this BS and you lose
credibility yourself in doing so.

Those are YOUR words, and it appears that you're now trying to
weasel
out
of
them by pointing the finger elsewhere.

Shape up, Nicholas. If you say something, either stand behind your
words or
bow out. You're sounding like Greybuns.

--
Ed Huntress

I stand by my words and dont appreciate people making assumptions
from
them
as they have.

No no no no no. You're not getting away with that. Here are your words
again:

"Hold up Ed. The act of cowardness was attacking inocent civilians
that wont or cant fight back under the circumstances."

That covers a lot of territory. As anyone who knows history is well
aware, you've just defined our attacks on Dresden, on Hiroshima, on
Nagasaki, and many other places. We made a big splash with it early in
the history of modern warfare, when Sherman marched to the sea and
burned Atlanta.

You've made a twisted and blatantly incorrect definition of cowardice.
Killing innocent civilians is a perverse act that's usually done to
inflict terror. It has nothing to do with bravery or cowardice. That's
what we did in Dresden. That's what we did in Hiroshima. That's what
we did in Nagasaki. That's what we did in Atlanta.

Our purpose was to terrorize those populations into surrender. Don't
give us some silly moralizing revisionism. That was intentional
terror, which we did to shorten the wars and to save the lives of many
of our own soldiers. IMO, it was entirely justified terrorism. It was
perverse. But I'd do it myself, under the same circumstances. Humans
often do perverse things out of necessity.

What bravery and cowardice are about is individual sacrifice, putting
oneself at risk of possible or certain death--or shrinking from it,
even when the coward knows that risking his life could save many more,
by winning a battle, or by terrorizing the enemy, if it comes to that.
The WTC attackers were not cowards. And your definition of cowardice
is ridiculous. It has nothing to do with the meaning of the word.

Ed you are better then this. Here is what I am annoyed about.
No it isnt something we are doing regulary in Iraq, nor do imply that
we
are
cowards, that is what I am talking about putting words in other
peoples mouth quit the ****!

What to you MEAN we aren't doing it regularly in Iraq?? We bomb some
place, killing a lot of people, and we usually don't even apologize
for killing the civilians. We puff up some words about how unfortunate
the "collateral damage" is. But we killed those civilians. You can
argue all you want about whether it's necessary or not, or about how
unfortunate it all is, but what you CAN'T do is moralize and hide from
the fact that we've killed thousands of them ourselves. And we knew we
were going to wind up killing them, going in, just like we knew we'd
kill tens of thousands of civilians in Dresden, or in the two cities
in Japan.

And to put it in the context of bravery or cowardice displays a lack
of clear-headed thinking about what those words MEAN. They mean
something. They don't mean what you're claiming they mean. If you let
yourself fall into that kind of self-delusion, you've become
irrelevant to the issue. If you can't think straight about these
things, you can't do anything that contributes to understanding the
subject.

--
Ed Huntress




Anyone with half a brain can understand that over the years the US has
killed innocent people by the thousands. The only difference is that some
Americans can't accept that we do the same thing terrorists do so they
concoct some kind of goofy fantasy where our killing innocents is
acceptable but when others do it's a horrendous crime. Any reasonable
mind understands that the only difference between what we do and what
others do is the excuses we use are different.

Hawke


More like the intent or how it happens the loss of lives. You made a blanket
statement that has flaws. In so many events Iraqi military used civilian
shields so you mix that into your stats. I remember during no fly zones they
would use tripple a fire in residential areas or areas with high asset
levels like oil pipelines to strategically deter our return fireI bet if you
look overall what we do and other countries do you would agree we still are
angels comparitvely.