Dinesh D'souza Can Read Definitions

D'souza is predictably under attack for writing a book claiming that cultural liberalism and the left is responsible for 9-11. Reading his response to critics on the right, I was shocked to find that he had, in the book, claimed that the 2000 attack on the USS Cole was not, in fact terrorism:

. . .Terrorism is defined as an attack on innocent civilians. Given that bin Laden declared war on America in 1996, al Qaeda’s assault on an American warship is not terrorism in the classic sense. This was an attack on a military target, akin to the Japanese kamikaze attacks on American ships during World War II.

Bravo. Anything done by Al Qaeda seems to be taken as terrorism these days, but when the Cole was hit we had already sent cruise missiles at training camps in Afghanistan and Sudan, trying to kill Bin Laden. To suggest that he is somehow out of line attacking a US warship is ludicrous. Granted, he is attacking us, and we should try to kill him for it, but it's not terrorism.

Similarly, you can, if you want to be generous, argue that the 9-11 attack on the Pentagon was not an act of terrorism. The Pentagon is the heart of the American military, and though it sounds good to claim the 'war on terror' was brought to us on 9-11, we had been using lethal force against Al Qaeda for some time. The only question is the civillians on the plane used to hit the pentagon. Now, just war theory holds that you can KNOWINGLY kill civillians (usually with some caveats about taking proper precautions, proportionality, and such), but that it's impermissible to INTENTIONALLY kill civillians. If the people who hijacked that plane truly believed they had no other way of attacking the US military, they could argue the act was not an act of terrorism.

The problem with this sort of justification (especially when used by the military)is that it's easy to say "gee, it's too bad thirty innocent people were killed, but we were after a legitimate target and we take such great precautions," and the public has essentially no way of knowing whether that is true. The military claims it does not keep records of civillian casualties, which you would think would be a prerequisite for taking extraordinary care not to cause them. How do you know whether you're doing a good job if you don't measure?

My own personal opinions is that the 9-11 hijackers probably did intend to kill the people on the plane, and their goal was to cause as big a spectacle as possible, regardless of who got hurt.

I doubt that the US military ever intentionally targets civillians (except for the occasional low-level commander who wants to get all the 'ragheads'), but that we don't particularly care when we do. Despite all of our protestations, I think if we really cared about not killing civillians, you would see different tactics, and efforts to determine casualty levels. The refusal to count the innocent dead is criminal, in my view.

Many today lament that we "don't have the will to fight the way we need to," usually meaning to ignore civillian casualties and inflict as much damage as possible to crush the enemy's will, as we did to Germany and Japan. I agree, we would be more likely to stop attacks against our troops and the Iraqi government if we did that, but it would destroy any possibility of justifying the war on moral grounds. There's no concievable way Iraq is 'better off' if we start indiscriminately killing.

We massacred the Germans and Japanese because we were engaged in a global conflict, which, while not existentially threatening to us, was so threatening to our allies, and it was clear (particularly in the case of Japan) that battlefield victories alone were not going to end the war. The situation here is entirely different.

At any rate, I've wandered from the original subject of this post, D'souza and his book. D'souza is right that his critics have not refuted his claim that Al Qaeda decided to attack America because of the left's actions. What they are criticizing is the implicit suggestion that we should alter our culture to accomodate those who attacked us (by becoming less disgusting heathens), which would rightly be called appeasement. Sorry buddy, America is the land of the free, and it's worth fighting and dying for to keep it that way. I don't know enough about Al Qaeda to say exactly why they attacked us (although I suspect that our foreign policies have much more to do with it that our culture), but it doesn't matter. Domestically, we ought to have freedom, and internationally, we ought to do what is best for America first, and more generally what is good for the world. Most especially, we should stop doing the grievous harm caused by such blunders as Iraq and Vietnam. We should do these things because they are right, regardless of why our enemies might want to kill us.