<Your argument is considerably more elaborate and well-worded, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't you basically trying to draw the same "moral equivalence" between warfare and terrorism against civilians that Bowser has been?

Only if you want to consider the IRA a real army.

I noticed a bit of antsiness on the part of those gentlemen when the US started declaring serious war on terrorism. But if it's only Islamicists who are the enemy, and not terror organizations in general, well, that's all right then.

But if Bowser's suggestions are weighing on your mind to the extent that you're drawing conclusions in other directions, perhaps that's where you need to be even though that's not where I was going.

You may have noticed I've largely stayed out of this. I have disagreements with every single position stated except one: a child's death by violence is never acceptable. I include child soldiers in this statement, though I place the blame for their deaths at the feet of those who gave the children the weapons that drew enemy fire upon them.

So, to answer your question, no: I was referring to narrowing things down to include only the "terrorists du jour".

Still, one has to recognize that there is a real moral difference between dropping bombs from 10,000 feet, and realizing logically that certainly innocent people must be dying down there among the factories, and going up next to a woman and child, looking straight at them, and killing them in their tracks by detonating high explosives in their faces. Granted, it doesn't make much difference to the charred little corpses in either situation, but we're talking about the perpretator's moral situation.

Yes: The first has only an abstract idea of the humanity of his victims. The second has an opportunity to see their faces. The first often returns home, sometimes with a sense of what he has done, but sometimes not. The second dies with his victims, on purpose. The moral situation is different, but depending how you feel about personal identity vs. anonymous target, I'm not so sure that one is better than another, only different. One could just as easily call the Unibomber morally superior to the suicide bomber because he never saw his victims' faces.

Otherwise, there would have been no effort -- and I believe the effort was genuine -- to avoid unnecessary civilian bombing casualties in Afghanistan, apart from putting the appropriate media spin on them. As you say, it was a logistical pain. The pain was tolerated because it was recognized as morally appropriate.

I can make a definite case for combat deaths of mutually hostile combatants being morally superior to either. And here, too, the "distance from target" argument doesn't make a fig leaf's difference in the morality of the action. Is sniping or aerial bombing morally superior to hand-to-hand combat because the sniper or airman is farther away? No. Is the soldier fighting hand-to-hand braver than the sniper or the airman? No. The quality of the experience is different, but not the virtues of the soldiers.

If your enemy insists on your extinction as a race or culture, it makes the "basic questions" a little difficult to address*, but that's not the main issue here.

Those basic questions are what makes Western civ what it is.

The dissonance that sometimes occurs between our principles and our actions causes us pain. The existence of those principles at all is at the bottom of the current call for the extinction of Western culture.

The issue is control over the minds, hearts and actions of whole populations, something impossible in open societies. The objective is absolute power. The fact that there is historical animosity (see also "Crusades") is merely being exploited to give the illusion of depth to the complaint.

The Arab-Israeli Real Estate Death Waltz has contributed a certain mood to the show, but the orchestration and libretto come from a quite different place.

Regards--
Mary Anne