3GW. It's not done that way anymore.
It's not? What do we call Eye-Rack? Afghanistan? Libya? Yemen? Crimea?
It is BEING done as I type these words.
Individual actors are perpetrating aggression against the U.S. from within sovereign states.
On their own initiative? What of when they are "handled" by others - directed to do what they do?
And how does one define "sovereign state" in this case? If a large corporate actor were directing "individual" acts of "terrorism" against targets in the United States and that actor had effective control over the government whence it was issuing its commands, would that not qualify as a "sovereign state"? If the government of that state were unable to act against the corporate agent for whatever reason, would it be your position that we cannot act against them?
You cannot declare war against the peoples of a sovereign state because there are actors within it.
Most certainly you
can. Whether it is advisable to do so is another question entirely.
Where does one draw the line between "the peoples" and the associated sovereign state? This problem of partitioning is the same that has existed for thousands of years. We are not the first to slaughter innocents, and we will not be the last. There are so many fundamental issues here.
For example, consider Germany ca. 1933. It can be plausibly argued that our decimation of the German people with the bombings of Hamburg and Dresden was warranted because the German people brought it on themselves, either through their failure to fight Hitler, or their active joining with him. Either way, they were all part of enabling his rise to power. But once again, where does one draw the line between responsibility to act and innocence? Are ALL the German people guilty of not having put Hitler down? What about the infants and toddlers? Did they deserve death in air raids?
Like all modern tyrants, Hitler hid his minions among the masses, using them as shields - whether intentionally or otherwise. When push came to shoot, the only way to dig out the NAZIs from the flesh of Germany was by the means employed, which resulted in millions of innocent people being killed. And yet, had those opposed to him not done what they did for the sake of preserving innocence, who knows what the world would look like today.
Why didn't we do the same with the Soviets? How much death and destruction by their hands would have been averted if we'd NOT handed them the plans to nuclear weapons on a silver platter and vaporized all their military facilities and their 15 largest cities, to boot? Were those Soviets innocent who failed to fight Lenin and Stalin?
Perhaps you gather the nature of war in general? It is a CRIME. What justification is there for it being waged on national and global bases? Innocents ALWAYS die at the hands of the warring parties. Other than completely ceasing to war, there is nothing any of us can do to stop these "states" from committing these atrocities. And most of the time vast pluralities of the national population are all on board with their "governments" going to bomb the shit out of someone.
Look at 9/11. Right afterward Americans were largely ready to go kill sand fleas. It was the same story after Pearl Harbor - yeah baby... go kill them Japs! So we cannot even blame only the governments for what transpires.
War is in the blood. It is part of what humans have become since the age of Empire. The Empire mind is a war-monger... at least so long as the warring is carried out far away.
Only a quantum alteration in the mind of the average man is going to put a stop to this insanity. Do you see that coming down the pike any time soon?
If you do what you get is perpetual war.
And do you imagine that Theye are not aware of this?
To avoid this you issue Letters of Reprisal.
Yes yes, but you are not taking Theire nature and objectives into account. Your subtext is one that presumes the capacity and intent to govern properly. That is most clearly not in evidence, whereas the contrariwise fact very much is. We have demons running our lives. We do nothing effective against them in the face of our ability to do so much more. Do we not deserve the abuses we suffer?
~hugs~
