The line between terrorism and counter-terrorism, in practice, in the historical record, has always come down to one thing: air power. The side with the air force calls the other side terrorists.
https://x.com/nxt888/status/2037586768925721061
The word "terror" has a legal and moral definition.
It means the deliberate use of violence against civilian populations to achieve political ends.
The point of the violence is not primarily military. It is psychological.
It is to break will, to induce fear, to make the cost of resistance feel unbearable.
That is what the word means. Apply that definition without prejudice.
From 1964 to 1973, the U.S. military dropped more than two million tons of bombs on Laos, which is more than the U.S. dropped on Germany and Japan combined during World War II.
Laos was not at war with the United States. It was a neutral country.
The bombing was secret. Congress didn't authorize it. The American public did not know about it.
Today, 50 years later, unexploded cluster munitions still kill and maim dozens of people in Laos every year, many of them children.
That is what "collateral damage" looks like across a generation:
A child loses a hand in a field because a weapon dropped before their parents were born is still active in the soil.
The United States developed and deployed the "double tap" drone strike protocol.
A practice in which a target is struck, and then when rescuers, family members, and bystanders arrive to help the wounded and recover the dead, the site is struck again.
From Pakistan to Yemen, and most recently in Iran, the pattern is familiar.
Think about what that means tactically.
The purpose of striking rescuers is not military.
Rescuers are not combatants.
The purpose is to make rescue itself dangerous, to ensure that the social fabric that holds communities together, the impulse to help the wounded, becomes a vector for death.
That is terror. That is the word. Applied accurately.
The United States used white phosphorus in Fallujah.
White phosphorus burns at 815 degrees Celsius.
It burns through clothing, through skin, through muscle, to bone. It reignites on contact with oxygen. Water does not extinguish it.
It was used in a city of 300,000 civilians.
The Pentagon initially denied it, then acknowledged it, then classified it as a legitimate weapon.
Doctors at Fallujah General Hospital reported a pattern of birth defects and cancers in subsequent years that researchers found statistically extraordinary.
Babies born without eyes. Without limbs. With multiple heads.
The contamination of a gene pool.
That is what white phosphorus does to a civilian population.
The line between terrorism and counter-terrorism, in practice, in the historical record, has always come down to one thing: air power.
The side with the air force calls the other side terrorists.
The side without the air force has no word for what is being done to them that will be heard in the international press.
https://x.com/nxt888/status/2037586768925721061
posted by Satish Sharma at
02:10
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