According to this article in the CSM, the US Dept of State has NEVER classified The Taliban as a terrorist organization.  This really boggles the mind -- or at least mine.  Then what are we doing there in Afghanisan?  

The article quotes Christopher Langdon, a terrorism expert with the Int'l Institute of Strategic Studies [in London] as stating that the Taliban is "..an insurgent organization that will periodically use terrorism to carry out it's operations."

Well, if that's the case the PLO, Hamas, Hizbollah and the like are equally innocent of the charge of terrorism.  Afer all, each of them is an "insurgent organization" and they all "periodically use terrorism to carry out" their operations.

Something REALLY IS NOT RIGHT HERE methinks.

To be sure, Langdon is an expert not affiliated wih the US gov't and he is voicing an opinion re his understanding of the US State Dept's reasoning.  Still, I gotta wonder.

Comments, please?

-- Modified on 5/3/2006 3:25:33 AM

-- Modified on 5/3/2006 6:46:17 PM

Why do you take the subway to wrok? Justdrive there. It is easier and you dont hvae to listn to all that carppy music.

In the world today we face many inconsistancies... and improper use of "labels"
Examples...
A white man kills a black man - considered a "crime of hate"
A black man kills a white man - considered an understandable act against a repressive society.

A person from the UK immigrates to the US, and is forced to "assimilate"
A person from Mexico, illegally enters the country, retains his culture intact with no attempt to blend - and is considered "Culturally Diverse"

Tuition on college campuses rise without respect to the consumer price index rises and billions of Federal support dollars, and it is considered a justified tuition increased....
Oil prices rise with no visible reason, and it is considered price gouging.

Wives provid sex, and upon divorce receive payments and it is considered "consideration for her loyalty and help"
Escorts provide sex, are paid, and are considered whores.

The list goes on.  We are so used to the meaning of words becoming "positioned" that the activity itself is totally lost.  Undocumented worker? common.  

I know that Mr. sprocket will weigh in - so let him.  It is an attempt to confuse what is really happening, by clouding issues with language that disguises the reality and brutality of what happened.

My only question is why.  to what end?

There is an essay by George Orwell in which he suggests that the more vague and elusive political language is, the worse generally are the motives and objectives of those who employ opaque wordings. ["Politics and The English Language"?  Certainly not an original insight, but his essay is often cited when a discussion turns that corner].

That being said, there is just something fundamentally wrong with the entire concept of terror/terrorist/terrorism when The Taliban doesn't qualify.  I mean, WTF gives?  I ask again, what are we doing in Afghanistan?  We're fight a campaign in The War On Terror, but the people we're fighting ain't terrorists?  And have never officially been considered as such by the USDeptState?

Opinions, please?

No! No! No!  Wrongo AMLAO.  The miserable [illegal] aliens keep beaming really terrible mariachi and raggae music into my brain no matter how I commute!

offend anyone.  I think a lot of people mock us, because we really won't stand up for ourselves.  Bashing americans has become a world sport.  but then again, we elect jokers for leaders... so what do we expect.

are Americans - or anybody - behaving in any way differently because the Taliban may or may not be on a particular State Dept list?

IOW, it seems to me that the 1st question should be, so what?  Please drop the other shoe.

If somebody doubts the situation, we can schedule a party to bash the Taliban, and/or terrorists, and identify them, and do other things too, like invite all the local cheerleaders and see who wants to get drunk and screw.

will "do something" every time al Jazeera or some other rag or tinhorn dictator badmouths the USA?

If so, what do you want them to do?   Stand up for us how?  Badmouth back?  Is it worth the time?  Go to war?  Do you really want that?

It seems to me that being high profile, and especially leading the world, is the sort of situation where we should expect that everybody is going to try to knock us off our perch.  That's what happens, it comes with the territory.  (Unless you're Canadian, living next to the lightning rod, and is that what you want?)

And collateral disrespect in the press is just collateral, ie hardly worth bandwidth.

We think it would be smart to understand that your view is fairly constant throughout the world, ie, there are a percentage of people who always tend to believe others are dumping on them, with more or less cause.  

Look at Bin Laden:  his entire career is oriented around the idea that the west shits on muslims.   So he decided to stand up.   Is this a good thing?  You want us to take his behavior as a model?

Let's assume for a minute that you had been in his shoes 30 years ago, with foreigners offending your land and religion in hundreds of ways, for many years, and your govt doing nothing much about it.   What would you have done differently than he has?

Shot down a few Libyan jets in Summer 1981.

Invaded Grenada in October 1983 to avenge the Beirut truck bombing of the Marine barracks a few days earlier.

Intercepted the jet carrying the murderers of Leon Klinghoffer in October 1985.

Bombed Colonel Khaddaffi's spare tent in April 1986.

Shot down an Iranian CIVILIAN airliner Summer 1988 [did everyone forget that?]. And on JULY 4TH no less!

I'm not sure what the overall rationale was in RR's thinking [oxymoron alert!?] re these events, but they don't seem all that overwhelming, impressive or consistent.

But maybe that's me, as I was never a RR fan.

are all that simple.

However, we think that Bizarro's point is that he wants a President to "do things" so that he doesn't feel like other people from foreign countries may be secretly or not so secretly mocking his Americanism.

This seems to us sort of like, politics for the sake of domestic entertainment - not that there's anything wrong with that.    Our personal view would be that when and why a particular person feels as though others whom he has never met might be mocking some aspect of his identity seems like a personal issue; and that foreign policy should probably not be oriented along those lines.

Our personal recommendations would be that (a) people who worry about America mockers per se should probably grow the fuck up, and (b) above all, they should stay out of the State, Commerce and Defense Depts.  They could go to Hollywood and find Steven Segal, see if he needs another poolboy.  But do NOT get work as a cabbie or driver, lest our highways run red with the blood of all those fucking foreigners.

Well, I'm not sure if Bizarro's point here was serious or meant in jest  - pushing the envelope of sarcasm/irony as you alluded to in a previous contribution last week.

Honestly, I'd like to be a saint living in a world full of other saints.  But the sad reality of int'l politics is that it's often driven by the lowest common denominator, and a willingness on the part of an enlightened state to shrug off insults and provocations as silly and immature WILL PROBABLY be interpreted by the less enlightened as weakness, lack or resolve, cowardice and the like.  Not exactly the rep you want in a Hobbesian dog-eat-dog world populated by homicidal corruptionists and worse [don't freak -- this is a reference made by Theodore Roosevelt to the political leadership of some Latin American countries, it's not original to me.  Sure like the ring of it strictly as a literary construct].

That having been said, I don't think the various RR initiatives I mentioned did much of anything for this country's position in the world -- no matter how violently Ronnie's spinmeisters spun those various events.  And shoting down a civilian airliner?  C'mon.  

On a personal note, and as an example of really bad analogy time, as a youngster I was the most peaceful and unpresuming of young boys, but I was involved in numerous fistfights all throughout grammar school.  Why?  My peers mistook my sterling individual qualities as weakness and constantly attempted to take advantage of me. Boy was I glad when I left that miserable dump behind.  And on a vindictive personal note, I recently read that my old gramar school  is one of the schools slated for closure/elimination by the Catholic Archdiocese of NY.  I'm not sure this qualifies as schadenfreude, but it sure as hell brings a smile to my tired old puss].

country and govenment likes Jerry Lewis!  How much of a joke can you be?

We've had no president that fits my bill - after ?  FDR Maybe?  and am not sure about him...

you're so humorous.   Just fucking hilarious, don't you get it?

Let's make it even funnier, and organize a stone-throwing contest in your neighborhood.  And we'll pass out molotov cocktails to make sure you get the joke.

(1) Not credible that Bizarro intends a joke.  IS a joke, entirely possible.

(2) Reagan didn't shoot down an Iranian airliner, and did not specifically intend to.  A US cruiser equipped with digital rather than analog radar monitors, and poor communications control, shot the a/c down.  The ship's captain needed to make an instant decision, and decided to protect his ship.   This sort of tragic stuff happens any time a situation is treated as hostile, read eg Tuchman's Guns of August.

While we are no fan of Ronnie, we think it is important to look at factual details.   We believe that being excited about the imponderable issue of what others may think of us is probably the surest way to communicate fear, and get into trouble.

As I remember the event, the Iranian airliner DID NOT have it's transponder on which would have allowed the US missile cruiser to ID it as a civilian craft.  Furthermore, the ill-fated airliner took off from a civilian airport located kinda close to an Iranian military air base, which was actively flying sorties over the Gulf throughtout the period, causing further confusion.  And the ship did have a reputation of being one with an aggressive captain who ran things on as close to a war footing as possible. And as part of the Kuwaiti tanker reflagging effort, the ship was on a war footing.

I still gotta wonder about all of this. Frank Carlucci and colin Powell brainstormed this one, and zero criticism it seems.

To our credit, RR did apologize and offer indemnity to the survivors and never tried to stonewall or walk away from our responsibility.  Would be that some other countries could be as big about admitting their deadly mistakes.

At no point did I believee RR was personally responsible for this act.  nor was it intentional.  But it could have easily been seen as possible given the totality of the circumstances.

And another way to get into trouble is to fail to try to reason as your opponent does, to assume that you share similar goals and values.  And it's not so much what they think of us in the abstract that matters, it's what those thoughts lead others to do in regard to their relations with us.

Yeah, but we're a country that twice elected RR and Bush the Younger.  Which is the greater cognitive failure?

There is a Republican in the House named Jerry Lewis, and he chairs a relatively important committee.  I can't help but chuckle when I think of it.

It's been my belief that  the French appreciation of Jerry Lewis is some sort of massive inside joke Les Frogies are playing on us.  Every time we reference it negatively they're laffing AT US becuase we don't get that the joke's on us.