>>>>You mean the words "war on terror" were everywhere, but in small print so I didn't see them, even before 9/11?
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>>>No. I think you missed it. "war on terror" wasn't until after Sept. 11. USA has been taking terrorist attacks for years. Therefore, it wasn't "Once the West itself became a target..." that the US woke up. It was largely ignored for years.
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>>We seem to differ on one detail here - the definition of target. You count embassies, military outposts etc. But these are always targeted, any country with an outside group which has an axe to grind against the country can count on its emissaries being attacked once in a while. I wasn't really counting that - it's when it happens inside the borders of the country, and the civilians die, when it really counts and provokes reaction.
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>Embassies are populated by civilians. The fact that they are "always targeted" does not legitimize them as targets.
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>My point was there have been terrorist attacks on western targets for years without a "war on terror" being declared. So it's not like the west was hit once and decided to wage war, its more like the west got hit and hit and hit for 30+ years and decided enough is enough.
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>>>>From what I remember, terrorism was a method of fighting throughout the XX century and well into XXI, but no official war was declared against it until 9/11. Before that, it was something the secret services took care of.
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>>>The secret services were operating in the "cold war".
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>>Not sure you understood what I said. Repeat: dealing with terrorists was always the job of the secret services, not the military.
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>>Or are you saying there are excusable circumstances for terrorist attacks?
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>I do not believe that there is any excuse for deliberately targeting civilians. That being said, in war, civilians will die. I differentiate the two.
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>I guess it depends on who is calling who terrorists. I've been reading about the American revolution recently and there are a couple of letters from British officers which refer to the Americans as terrorists. Since the Americans were strictly targeting the British military, and their sympathesizers, I do not equate this to terrorism, but clearly the British did.

Well, that's not strictly true. There were factions that burned homes and offices of British bureaucrats and such in the States before the revolution was officially declared. Now you can argue that administrators and bureaucrats were part of the British machine, but they weren't really 'military', and certainly their families weren't.