The Key War on Terror Propaganda Tool: Only Western Victims Are Acknowledged

> Is the author seriously suggesting to view deliberate terror attacks against civilians the same as military strikes (drones or planes — I don't see a difference) performed against enemy combatants, by people who are trying to minimize civilian casualties as far as they can?

You are making a lot of assumptions, which Greenwald actually addresses and refutes at the beginning of the article. The targets are often not combatants; in fact, many of the targets have no known identity at all. If anybody strains to minimize civilian casualties, they're doing a piss-poor job of it. In fact, often it looks as if non-combatants and civilian structures were deliberately targeted.

But you are of course right. As long as you a priori define allied action as legitimate military strikes, and enemy action as illegal terror attacks, you will always be right. And that is the very point of the article.

Let's agree to disagree on that one. Because the discussion we should be having is, what objectives is the "War on Terror", (or, as I like to call it, because terrorism is just a method of warfare, War on War) trying to achieve, and are they worth the price?

There are shorter videos from Chomsky on this, but this one breaks it down thoroughly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvZRsdHgxgA

The truth is, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq are colonial wars against insubordinate populations. We extract resources from those countries and their neighbors. When someone stands in the way they have to be punished so that other countries stay in line.

There is little hope of winning hearts and minds with all the civilians that have to be killed. The main goal is to punish and make examples of insubordination. The West merely needs to scare them and their neighbors to get its way within a few decades. It worked well enough with Vietnam.

> Is the author seriously suggesting to view deliberate terror attacks against civilians

No. The prompt for the article is pointing out the difference in coverage & attention from the white house and press about a casualty from a US drone strike when the innocent victims were Western. Various terror attacks are mentioned, but that is not the core topic of the article.

> the same as military strikes performed against enemy combatants,

From the article: "Indeed, Obama officially re-defined the term “combatant” to mean “all military-age males in a strike zone.” In other words, as The New York Times reported in 2011, all males between 18 and (roughly) 54 killed by U.S. drones are presumed to be combatants — terrorists — “unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”"

> by people who are trying to minimize civilian casualties as far as they can?

from the article: "There are so many heinous stories of U.S. drones blowing up children and innocent adults. Obama used cruise missiles and cluster bombs to kill 14 children and 21 women in a Yemeni village (weeks after winning the Nobel Peace Prize), while a 2012 drone strike attacked a Yemeni wedding convoy and “killed 12 passengers in the vehicle, including three children and a pregnant woman.”"

And then the more recent one: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-doctors-without-borders-ameri...

...

In other words, your first sentence is a straw man. The comparison is not between terror attacks and military strikes, the military strikes are often not against enemy combatants (and they're almost never against high-ranking terrorists), and the attacks are not trying particularly hard to minimize civilian casualties. That you would try to make such a point, despite all evidence to the contrary, is the result of precisely the propaganda that the article is trying to pick apart.

EDIT: rdancer's comment probably makes this point better than mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10795263

> Why not?

Intention does matter. A military which aims to reduce civilian casualties and fails is less evil than a terrorist who deliberately targets civilians.

We have statistics. We know the probable outcomes. The man who pushes the button doesn't know if he's going to kill civilians and how many of them in that particular case, but the average number of civilans killed per bomb is well known. He knows that his actions will cause the death of a certain amount of innocents, and still he pushes the button in order to advance the political or military objectives of the entity he belongs to. On the other hand, if terrorists were able to drop bombs on the homes of high ranking army members and politicians of the West from drones travelling at 30 thousand feet and controlled from thousands of miles away, wouldn't they do so? Of course they would. Would that make them better?