Terrorism has been a war strategy for centuries; it's fairly effective in certain circumstances and for certain aims.

Bombing of Dresden killed so many people and destroyed a beautiful city. The battle of the Bulge or the invasion of Normandy were the turning points of the war not the constant bombing of population centers. Dropping of the atomic bombs in Japan wasn't the main factor for Japan's surrender, because afterall they were willing to die to protect their country down to every man, woman and child.

What did the Germans achieve with the constant bombing of London?

Assymetrical warfare against a well armed larger force has been with humanity for years. But when the target is only civilian populations then it ceases to be warfare and is considered slaughter/mass crimes.

Like I said, some situations, some objectives, it's very effective.

without terrorism. Hamas for example was democratically elected but they have yet to embrace this reality and act like a democratically elected body.

South Africa is another good example: terrorism is the leverage the resistance uses to gain access to politics.

Terrorism to enact political change doesn't work in the long run, so the democratic options are then explored. Surprise! That actually works. Terrorism is the worst possible choice to try to enact political change but it is the path of least resistance but it is essentially a dead end (eg Kurds and Turkey).

And I think Fatah's current situation is another illustration of that.

There were people in Japan who wanted to sue for peace as early as May 1945, because they knew it was hopeless to continue, especially after their main ally, Germany, was defeated. Unfortunately, they tried to relay this through the USSR, which at the time was not technically at war with Japan. Unbeknownst to them, the USSR and the US had agreed at Yalta to allow the USSR to take all of the Kurile Islands and the Japanese part of Sakhalin Island, if Stalin would join in the war against Japan. So Stalin had no intention of relaying the Japanese request to the Americans, as he was eagerly waiting for his chance to get those islands.

You didn't even mention the USSR in your post. They did the bulk of the fighting and dying in Europe and terror was at the heart of Stalinism long before the war.

During the war it only became more important. The Soviet's own figures show 157K Soviet soldiers shot for desertion or cowardice and that number is definitely too low, because not everybody was counted. Add to that the millions of those arrested, deported, and sent to the camp system, etc. during the same period and you're in the many millions. The death rate in the camp system in 1942 was just under 25 percent.

Terror was the name of the game in the area where the war was decided - and that was also true before the war happened. And this isn't even to mention that the Germans pretty much did nothing but terror in the occupied east. The whole war here was practically built on terror. While many of the worst Soviet actions during the war were typically unnecessary, the war might have turned out differently without many others.

Terrorism isn't what allowed Stalin and the Soviets to make a counter offensive against the Germans or how the siege of Stalingrad failed miserably for the Germans. The Germans treatment in the occupied east only made their(Soviet population) resolve stronger. But it was the combination of climate and weather patterns that they were not accustomed to, and the fact that Stalin didn't have to keep Siberian divisions near Manchuria (fearing Japan).

Stalin was a very fearful man, which is why he conducted so many purges of officers, why he didn't trust the United States (and allies), Germany or Japan frankly. Even post WWII he didn't trust the Allies. It is said that the USSR had the Soviet bloc nations as a means to threaten the West. Most historians are starting to agree that the Soviet bloc nations were actually a buffer zone, to thwart any thrust into the USSR itself. Stalin feared the allies would do what the Germans did with a surprise offensive.

It is true that many suffered terrible fates for dissertion in the Soviet army. But the counter offensive was mainly led by the well trained, highly motivated Siberian divisions. Not by the poorly trained red army that was thrust into action. Before the Siberian divisions entered into the fray the Soviets were losing.

Even the threat of being killed for dissertion was still not enough for the Soviets to stop the Nazi blitz deep into the USSR.

Order 227 is a famous phrase in Soviet parlance. That was the July, 1942 decree of 'not a step backwards,' which essentially defined retreating as a treasonous act. Such a policy had already been enforced ad hoc, notably in the 1941 battle that you referred to as so decisive (which it was). Look up 'blocking detachments' to see what I mean. BTW, that 157K executed represents a little over half of all US personnel lost during the war on all fronts.

And the third paragraph needs to be cut entirely. We're talking about a 3+year war effort. The Siberian reinforcements are critical at a certain time, but the mainstay of the armed forces was the rest of the Soviet people

Your're missing the big picture here. The entire Stalinist state was built on terror. Your venture into the postwar world doesn't matter in the discussion of whether or not terror won the war itself. The state built and practiced one of the absolute worst terror regimes of all time. And they won the war with it. That's what happened

they would have been able to stop the Nazi thrust. Stalin consolidated his power through terror yes, but he almost lost to the Nazis because of it. Terror never works in the long run.

First of all, it wasn't just the air force. Most of the roughly 50K who were shot were regular army officers.

Many of them were capable. Without a doubt their loss harmed the Red Army's ability to withstand the initial German thrust. But there was also a new conscription law that went into effect in 1939, which greatly expanded the army. Many thousands were given commissions and most of them had little real experience. Quite a few were not very capable of qualified. So while the purge mattered, it's been argued that the rapid expansion of the military very much diluted talent in the officer corps as well.

And the disaster that unfolded in 1941 also had to do with Soviet doctrine, which was fundamentally offensive. Plans called for the Red Army to immediately counterattack and drive invaders from Soviet soil. There were no plans for organized withdrawals. This was a big reason why you saw those enormous encirclements in the summer of fall of 1941, which captured millions of Soviet soldiers. That had less to do with the officer corps and more to do with overall objectives and strategy.

And it's true that prewar terror harmed the Soviet war effort in other ways, notably by inducing widespread collaboration with the Germans in the Western borderlands.

But also have to look at terror not just in the military but in society as a whole. A big reason the Soviets won the war is that of all the major combatants, they were the most effective at fully mobilizing their society for war. They did this with terror. Plain and simple. Being just a few minutes late to work, for example, was a crime punishable by a stretch in the camps. In a famous phrase, the government essentially 'criminalized passivity' in the rear, in the army, and even in German-occupied areas through partisan bands who took their directions from Moscow.

Stalin didn't just 'consolidate his power' with terror. He maintained it through terror all the way until he died in 1953. Like I said, this was a thoroughly terrorized society before, during and after the war. And this was the society that beat Hitler.

And THAT nonsense pretty much invalidates, for me, anything else you might otherwise have to say.

Before the dropping of the atomic weapons, there were routine fire bombings hitting japan. Most of the population centers in Japan used highly flammable building material and lot of people were killed as a result. Anti American sentiment was building because of this "terror tactic" of fire bombing.

Lemay knew EXACTLY how to use incendiary bombs to create a firestorm. It was intentional.

Don't you dare pretend that the houses just burned up cause they were paper.

It is barely better than holocaust denial.

look up Dresden. But what building material they had access in Asia is not the same as in Germany.

Some guerrillas will feed and cloth the citizenry to get them on their side. Some guerrillas will try to strike fear in the people in order to give the enemy more problems to deal with.

Terrorists want to strike fear, or death, or fear of further death...

thus we clearly make a distinction in the modern era that speficially targeting civilians through fear or trauma (physical or mental) is terrorism.

In other words terrorism is no longer a tool part of warfare of any respected state in the world. This is why so many are upset with the usage of Drones in foreign, sovereign nations.

Whatever happened to All's Fair in Love...?

Desperate warriors and underdogs will go to extremes and frowned upon tactics.

The distinguishing feature of a combatant is the bearing of arms against an enemy; one chief distinguishing feature of a criminal combatant is the taking for target of operations non-combatant persons, rather than combatant persons.

The dispute with the Bush administration was not declaring 'terrorists' to be enemy combatants, but declaring prisoners presumed combatants to be illegal combatants, and doing it by fiat. The determination whether a prisoner taken in arms is an illegal combatant is supposed to be determined by a trial or hearing, in which the same law and procedure that would apply to the captor's military personnel is employed. A lesser element of dispute was the naming of a person such as Padilla to be an 'enemy combatant' rather than a criminal, when he had had in fact been apprehended by civilian police in the normal course of their duties. While this man certainly met a reasonable standard for being considered an enemy in the field, since the civil authority could be exercised over him, it was unnecessary and excessive to take him out of the civil sphere.

That's the point of it all, isn't it? To kill and terrorize your enemies into surrendering. There's no such thing as honorable war or noble war. Right and wrong is all a matter of perspective. No one ever entered a war thinking they were on the side of wrong.

It's all semantics.

definition of the term. But I make a dinstnction between killing and murder, and I do the same for crime and combat. There are situations where it can be ambiguous, but most of the time we can discern the differences. But when mass shooting murders are called "mass killings" it is easy to see why there is so much confusion.

I recognize the shades of grey as well but in general the statement is true.

Not to go all off point, but the etymology of "terror" from which "terrorism" is derived, is the Latin terrere. The word for terrorism in Greek tromokratia which may just be an alternative spelling to what you have (I'm not an expert in Greek). But in any case, translating a word from English into its modern equivalent in another language is scarcely relevant to any subsequent discussion.

Political change through demokratia has always proven more succesful then traumakratia. Political change through the ballot box has always proven to be far more effective than the use of bombs. That is why I specifically pointed this out and also tie in the fact that terrorism has goals to enact political change (obviously not through peaceful means).

has been to kill innocent civilians in illegal wars in far away places. Based on this, every US president - including every Democratic president you'd care to name - is an assassin & mass murderer. At first we used the regular armed forces - Army, Navy, Marines. Then we used bombs dropped from great heights. Then we used missiles launched from far away.

The Orwellian-named "War On Terror" is a horrific development in our foreign policy. But unless & until we can get terrorism treated as it should be internationally (not a military issue, but one of law enforcement), and unless & until we can get our so-called allies in Saudi Arabia to stop financially supporting the people who want to kill us, and unless & until we can get those marginally organized countries (like Yemen & Pakistan) to cooperate in the criminal investigations of terrorism, we have to deal with the world as it is rather than as we wish it to be.

All this pearl-clutching over the use of drones to destroy a single building to ensure to death of a single individual, rather than carpet-bombing cities with fleets of B-52s to kill them maybe, is not just a little myopic. If you have no complaints about Obama killing bin Laden, or Clinton lobbing cruise missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan, or Carter's covert military support & training of the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion, then you've really got nothing to complain about with these drone strikes.

The targeting of Royal offices and their families was terrorism, and the British retaliation against those terrorists by imprisoning, torturing, and killing their friends and families was terrorism, too.

Terrorism is a tactic as old as war. It has served as a last resort, sole recourse, and to force enemies to the table. Pretending that anything at all has changed in the last few decades is simply a charade to justify what we declared was wrong long before.

For that matter, isn't raining sudden death from above itself a form of terrorism?

Some will disagree, but terrorism is not considered a legit part of the took kit of warfare for respected states. This is why some states (eg United States) flirt within this ambiguous area often but most of the Western and Eastern world dislike the United States even contemplating such thing. After all, the United States was the only country to ever drop an atomic weapon on a population center. We as the United States should know better.

any less wrong than we are today. It always comes down to who has the power to impose their will and declare the definition. Making war on civilian populations is a time honored tradition going back thousands of years. We're doing it today and pretending we have the right to do it because they do it as well.

The very concept of respected states, as you put it, is just another charade for those with the power at the moment to cover their slaughter of whomever they please for whatever reason they deem necessary. Were we a respected state when we were committing our own genocide here in North America? Across central and South America, the entire continent of Africa, and Asia? The only place on earth that we haven't carried out a policy of mass-murder at one time or another is Antarctica, and that only because no one lives there.

This is what people should understand, that the quest for power is driven by the desire to use that power, period. The founders of this nation understood this. Coming from the greatest Empire on earth, they were intimately familiar with this motivation and process, and in creating the apex of The Enlightenment, they did a pretty good job of making a framework wherein people had a chance to shift this age-old paradigm. This is the ideal of this nation, but we've never realized that ideal nor been allowed to even come very close.

Today, we have lost even the idea of freedom from the tyranny of the powerful and busy ourselves with the fantasy that we can get some for ourselves, as this whole debate clearly demonstrates.

"Shock and awe"

AKA terror.

defintion of terror. It didn't really work out for the United States either in the long run either.