Thanks for your excellent quote-response, David.

In a rather petty-dysfunctional frame of mind recently, I took a copy of Che Guevara\'s "Guerilla Warfare" onto an internal UK flight for light inflight reading.

Here is one of the great moments in it:

"This is the colonial realm of North American monopoly, its reason for being and last hope, the "backyard of its own house." If all the Latin American peoples should raise the flag of dignity, monopoly would tremble; it would have to accomodate to a new political-economic situation and to substantial pruning of profits. Monopoly does not like profits to be pruned, and the Cuban example, this "bad example" of national and international dignity, is gaining strength in the countries of America...

...This Cuban example is bad, a very bad example, and monopoly cannot sleep quietly while this bad example remains at its feet, defying danger, advancing toward the future. It must be destroyed, voices declare..."

It struck me that today\'s world would be both incredibly familiar and incredibly alien to Che. The familiarity would be in how the small Latin American countries of Venezuela and Bolivia are stealing a progressive march  while corporate-military US elite interests are bogged down elsewhere. Note, that on the UK Guardian blog comments section recently, there was a piece implicitly accusing Evo Morales of being irresponsibly divisive in honouring his democratic mandate, as opposed to betraying it for the benefit of monopoly interests.

What I believe would suprise Che, would be the obscurantist, petty-terrorist resistance of radical Islam; how secular nationalism has degraded into a delusional golden-agism rather than into a resistance developing toward liberating and continental-wide solidarity. Of course, Europe\'s elite self-interest, and sell-out cowardice before Washington, would be nothing new to him.

Kelvin:

Great quote from James Baldwin. -- Thanks for posting it.  

Of course, you\'re right about Baldwin\'s prescience when it comes to Afghanistan and Iraq.  But only because -- as you note -- its truth is as old as the hills, and captures American practices that are as trans-generational, and deeply institutionalized.

Anyway.  One good quote deserves another. -- How about this one?  

  [O]n that broad road of opposition to law and authority, along which streams the millions of humanity too low to grasp even the value of laws and institutions about them, resisting them from an ignorant and blind selfishness which makes them believe they are improving their own conditions by violating them, there are found walking men of a totally different order -- white-robed sons of the gods with the light on their foreheads, who have left the narrow paths walled in by laws and conventions, not because they were too weak to walk in them, or because the goals towards which they led were too high, but because infinitely higher goals and straighter paths were calling to them -- the new pathfinders of the race! 

  These men, who raise as high above the laws and conventions of their social world as the mass who violate them fall below, are yet inextricably blended with them into the stream of souls who walk in the path of resistance to law. 

  From the monk Telemachus, who, springing into the Roman arena to stop the gladiatorial conflict, fell, violating the laws and conventions of his society -- a criminal, but almost a god -- up and down all the ages man has been on earth there have been found these social resisters and violators of the accepted order, the saviors and leaders of men on the path to higher forms of life.

(Olive Schreiner, From Man to Man, 1927. -- Quoted in Howard Thurman, The Luminous Darkness, 1965.)  

I think Mayer\'s questions "what mindset makes a terrorist like this? And how do you deal with this?" are extremely important. Our terrorist enemies are unreasoning and hateful and should be killed. I see nothing wrong with this. That\'s the bright side.

Yes, \'The Dark Side\' is altogether standard, in that it implies that US elite foreign policy generally throws a benificent light on our blighted planet.

I like Mayer\'s bald egotism in constructing the Beirut \'terrorist\' act against US marines as key, largely because she happened to be around about there at the time.

I\'m reading Michael Albert\'s Parecon again, and he begins with an excellent quote from James Baldwin:

"The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberatel;y, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their "vital interests" are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the "sanctity" of human life, or the "conscience" of the civilized world."

Now you would think that given Iraq, James Baldwin must have nothing less than biblical foresight, but, then, this foreign policy thing has been going on for some time.

Alexei: That is a good question.  Remember that the U.S. Marines were deployed to Lebanon in September, 1982, to cover the retreat of the Israeli Defense Forces back to the area in the south that they would occupy all the way through 2000.  The Israeli forces were the aggressors and belligerents; the U.S. Marines covered their asses.  If we were to ask honest experts in international law what this makes the U.S. Marines, I\'m sure there would also be honest disagreement.  But I know for a fact that there was regular exchange of fire between the U.S. forces and factions then struggling in the context of the Israeli invasion-and-withdrawal and the ongoing Lebanese civil war. There is also no doubt that when the Marines suffered this attack, it was because they were viewed not as neutral peacekeepers by their attackers, but as partisans backing the Amin Gemayel regime in Lebanon\'s civil war. -- Only attacks on non-combatants can possibly count as crimes, to make a long story short.  

On the other hand, when this October 23, 1983 suicide-bombing attack was carried out on the U.S. compound at the Beirut airport, I doubt whether there was a single reaction to the incident in the U.S. media that didn\'t attribute the act to "terrorists."  And in this uniformity of reaction, what we find is hardly inspiring.

Maks: But there are important inquiries into the why-question, as well as into the correlation between the violence of one side and the entirely predictable resistance with which it is met.   

Take a look at Robert A. Pape\'s work, including his book, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House 2005).

Frederic:

Except that a terrorist is insofar as what a terrorist does.

Here, there, are two fair definitions of the act of terrorism.  (1) "[V]violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State;" and that "appear to be intended - (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping…."  (United States Code, Title 18, Part I, Ch. 113B, Section 2331, 1984.)  And (2) "Any action…that is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants, when the purpose of such act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population, or to compel a Government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act."  (A more secure world: Our shared responsibility. Report of the Secretary-General\'s High-level Panel on Threats (New York: United Nations, 2004), para. 164(d).)

The problem is not that these definitions suffer from over-broadness or inexactness.  The problem is that Americans such as Jane Mayer use them in a highly politicized and convenient fashion to designate something like people who are taking up arms against the American military and its allies.

I don\'t think this cuts it. 

I don\'t think it\'s wrong to point to real terrorists, folks like Osama who use violence to accomplish destructive means. I think it\'s wrong to use the word "terrorist"  without implying that the US is the world\'s leading terrorist state. "War on terror", of course...