Black Tuesday: Act of Crime, Or Act of War?

Some university professors have stated that Bloody Tuesday "does not constitute an act of war against the United States." What that attack constitutes, instead, is aggression by terrorist criminals, not terrorist governments.

These professors are not alone in their thinking. Many believe the U.S. now faces an enemy "unlike" any the U.S. has confronted in the past and, therefore, America faces a fundamentally different kind of conflict. While those of the professorate, perhaps correctly, point out the flaws in an analogy between Bloody Tuesday and Pearl Harbor, history disagrees that terrorist attacks do not constitute acts of war and offers, as a suitable analogy, the Spanish Civil War.

Many historians have called the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39, Hitler's dress rehearsal for World War II. In that civil war Nazis terrorists eventually overthrew the legitimate Republican government of Spain, installing a fascist puppet dictator.

Indeed, Nazis storm trooper terrorists cowered the nations of Austria and Czechoslovakia before the German army occupied them.

Was not Hitler waging war against Spain, Austria and Czechoslovakia? Shall we believe that Nazi terrorists acted without the direction of the Nazi government? Was not the Nazi German government itself a terrorist government?

If, as some claim is their concern, it is innocent lives one wishes to safeguard, how many millions of innocent lives would have been spared had war been declared and bombs dropped on Nazi Germany before its open aggression against Poland in 1939?

To say, in the late 1930's, that no one knew the Nazi government was a terrorist government would have been ridiculous. Saying, today, that no one knows what nations are run by terrorist governments is, at best, irresponsible.

· The Afghan government has been, for a decade, aiding and abetting terrorists, including bin Laden, by giving them sanctuary, allowing them to come and go with impunity.
· In 1983 the Iranian government financed the truck bombers who murdered 241 U.S. Marines in Beirut, Lebanon.
· In 1994 then Iranian "president" Hashemi Rafsanjani, declaring war on American interests worldwide, urged Arab terrorists to hijack planes or to blow up factories in Western nations.
· In 1998 the New York Times reported: "Evidence suggests that Iran sponsored the attack" in 1996 that killed 19 U.S. soldiers in their barracks in Saudi Arabia.
· In 1999 the State Department reported Iran to be "the most active state sponsor of terrorism" in the Mid-East.
· In May of this year, in Teheran, an amalgam of the world's foremost terrorist groups met and resolved to unite against the U.S., declaring a "Holy War" against America.

The same type of irrefutable evidence also exists against Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan and the PLA.

Bloody Tuesday was not the result of individual behavior but of the national policy of terrorist nations. To now urge some sort of world criminal prosecution of terrorist crooks -- with their fellow terrorist cronies making up part of the jury -- is sheer sophistry. To suggest further, as have some professors and clergy, that America should be held morally responsible for the deaths of any foreigners that result from U.S. attacks on the terrorist governments is nothing less than moral blackmail, an attempt to disarm the nation. Such a position guarantees the slaughter of, not tens of thousands, but millions of American citizens and the annihilation of every free nation on earth.

Sept. 11 was an act of war. America has a moral obligation to respond with the massive, non-proportional force of war. If America does not, then the blood of innocents will be on her Hands.

Steven Brockerman is a writer for Capitalism Magazine.