the beautiful thing about motive is that is pure speculation, you can assign whichever you like and, if the person to whom you are assigning it is dead, there is no-one to say that you are wrong. so it goes with the conservative mythology of "evil" as the sole motive for a suicide bombing---nothing political could enter into it. i dont see anything in this but an attempt to dehumanize the "enemy".....what ustwo find bewildering, really, is that not everyone buys into the right's hollow and tedious rhetoric, which constitutes such basis that there is for bushwar in its various modalities.
typically, these same conservative ideologues like to act as thought their rhetoric is a necessary frame of reference: so if you do not accept their terms, they impute to you the opposite--so it somehow follows that if you do not see in a suicide bomber someone who is simply "evil" you must necessarily view them as "freedom fighters"--which only makes sense if the assumption above is accepted.
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But this time out we are not fighting to keep our "pure culture" as america is not made of one type of people, but fighting against people who would strap bombs to themselves and blow up innocent people celebrating a wedding or praying to God.
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nonsense.
first, you get amongst these various threads on iraq a repeated citation of the "clash of civilizations" narrative, which the right will invoke when it suits their purposes, and which really does switch this bizarre war on ghosts into an attempt to defend western "christandom" against infidels. welcome to the song of roland, folks--nothing more advanced in it that that.
as for target choices--i would not pretend to justify blowing up folk at a wedding on ethical grounds. but how would this act in principle be any different, really, from things like american actions in fallujah--you know, the posting of snipers atop a hosptial who shot everyone and anyone who happened onto the street?
how is it that one set of civilian casualties is Evil and another is not?
this kind of consideration is important--and it is directly at stake in the debates over the legitimacy of the war in iraq, during the course of which 27,000-31,000 civilians are supposed to have been killed.
say the war in iraq is illegitimate, its premises false: that would mean that the united states, driven by its hysterical reaction to 9/11/2001, aided by a credulous legislature which abdicated its responsibilities to check executive power, has put the u.s. in a position within which its actions cannot be coherently distinguished from those of its alleged adversaries, the "terrorists"....
geez, that can't be good.