Quote: Pariah said: Amazingly enough, I have to agree with Dave here.
However, I do find the distinct difference that modern terrorists target innocent civilians whilst those resistances were both response to military occupation rather concerning. So I'm kind of a swing voter.
I agree with you. I have thought about this a lot over the years. Military targets are fair game - the bombing of USS Cole, for example, and the deaths of the hundreds of US marines in Beirut all those years ago. Civilians are not - that is criminal. In 9/11, the Pentagon would have been a fair target except that it involved the death of the people on board that flight. They were not fair targets. Obviously neither were the occupants of the WTC, the people of Dresden, nor the inhabitants of Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki (why an atomic bomb wasn't dropped on someplace symbolic like Mt Fuji I do not know).
I'm very hawkish on struggle for change. Time and time again we see that armed resistance achieves results. See for example the US War of Independence. Unilateral disarmament is the same as bearing your throat, and its no surprise that Hamas and Hezbollah won't do it. The IRA has only recently done it because money from Boston dried up post 9/11 (forcing them to rob a bank last year for funding).
(The examples of South Africa, and people power in the Philippines, Thailand, and more recently in Ukraine and the other former Soviet republics are the surprising exceptions.)
But it should be armed resistance against military targets, not civilians.
