<(If you'll notice, the folks on this board still have not been able to define "terrorism" in any manner which excludes the US as a terrorist organization.)

The United States as a nation does not have a policy to set out to deliberately maximize the death of noncombatants in a conflict. A terrorist organization, like Al-Quaeda, or the radical Palestinians, does.

To elaborate:

Terrorists hurt harmless noncombatants as their PRIME PURPOSE. It's what they set out to do. It's what they draw up plans to do. They alter the plans to maximize innocent deaths ("let's stick nails in this bomb!") They train in camps to learn methods of doing this.

Killing innocent unarmed people is their goddam JOB. Not an accident, or a stupid mistake like shooting up a wedding.

The United States bends over backwards, often risking our own soldiers, to avoid noncombatant deaths.

As an aside, if Israel was really as terrorist as it's painted to be, it would fire missiles at places that it not only knew contained no terrorists, but could not POSSIBLY contain terrorists. It would blow up buildings with missiles instead of knocking them over with bulldozers. Arafat would have been dead years ago. Israel has a lot of military power. One could think of a LOT of damage Israel could do if it really wanted to maximize Palestinian civilian deaths. In fact, one could make a good case that there wouldn't be any Palestinians left any more, and the whole issue would be moot.

Is this really that hard? Is anyone else having trouble following this reasoning?