>>As to Afghanistan - or just about anyplace - a guy with a rifle shooting at soldiers is a fighter of some kind. He may be a guerilla or a soldier or a revolutionary or traitor - depending on which side you are on. I may be able to respect him, even as I try to kill him. I can at least understand why he may feel he is morally right.
>>
>>But a person who sends a child into a marketplace with a bomb strapped to his body, killing without care as to whom he kills, is a terrorist. I think he has committed a sin against the Universe.
>>
>>I think you would agree.
>
>How do you classify 9/11 if you do it analytically ? Pentagon and White House are targets clearly more than non-discriminative, and the Twin Towers were a hefty symbol of much of the things despised despised by the people attacking, which respect/think more in symbols than the west.
>The people on the planes were clearly "bystanders", but casualties to non-combatants happen in other conflicts also.
>
>thomas

If killing symbols is the issue, moral equivalency to the Twin Towers attack would be to drop a daisy cutter on Mecca during Haj. No doubt we'd hit a lot of people who don't like us, but it would be an atrocity with no purpose other than to offend decency and enrage the civilized world.

Casualties do in fact happen in other conflicts, but the attempts to avoid "collateral damage" or even assess it are a rather modern innovation. And the very people who scream the loudest about the "Geneva Convention" feel fine about abrogating the part that would prevent combatants from using a civilian population as human shields.

Of course civilians who were killed in Baghdad by American air were just as dead as if we had directly targeted them, but they were surely fewer in number than would have been the case had our goal been to see how many civilians we could kill.

A terrorist wants exactly the opposite result. The attitude can be seen in the internecine conflicts in that part of the world where the bomb loaded with ball bearings in a crowded marketplace is somehow seen as a viable tool by the very people who talk about "atrocities" of airpower that would be completely capable of making Baghdad look like the surface of the moon in an hour but instead uses rules of engagement and targeting that risk its own pilots to avoid the kind of pointless slaughter the people on the ground are wreaking on each other.

I would agree something like the fire-bombing of Dresden was terrorism, albeit in time of war. I don't think it was moral, but then much that happened at that time in that area was not.

But 9/11 was terrorism by madmen who felt called by God to smite the enemy and to create ... terror. An auto de fe.

And from a strategic point of view it served no useful purpose but rather served to demonstrate a self-destructive nihilism and a complete lack of comprehension of any long-term self-interest.