I don't think we disagree very much, but I certainly see terrorism as ultimately self-defeating. [Note that I'm against terrorism (not self-defense or legitimate resistance to armed military invaders or occupiers) anyway, whether it works or not.]

However, I don't mean by "self-defeating", that is has no impact. Of course, terrorist attacks provoke predictable responses. It always "works" in the sense that it provokes these responses.

1. It often, although not always, leads to an exaggerated backlash response, but this almost never benefits the population the terrorists ostensibly represent.

2. In rare cases, it may lead to removal of a military presence, but only when the state with the military presence is already very ambivalent. As you say - the terrorism of the Beruit baracks bombing got us out of Lebanon in the 1980's;

09/11 got our installations removed from Saudi territory which was one of Al Qaeda's top demands. Of course that's not entirely true about Saudi territory, but you could have mentioned France in Algeria. However, the state of affairs in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Algeria was not much "improved" by these successes, and the vast majority of terrorism-associated independence movements are even less effective.

3. I'm personally almost positive that terrorist (leaders), in the vast majority of cases, don't want to achieve their stated objectives. Typically, when a resolution of the situation they claim to object to threatens to arrive, they attempt to derail it with some particularly egregious act. Raising funds for terrorism is their career.

Peter Ustinov was half wrong, terrorism is NOT the "war of the poor" or the weak, or whatever it was. He seems to have confused rational and justified resistance to military invaders and occupiers, with senseless and sadistic acts on irrelevant civilians.

...I just hope Drudge doesn't link to it!

When I march in street actions in San Francisco, I usually march with the anarchist kids, but leave before they break off to goon it up with the SFPD or engage in petty vandalism. I don't deny that heaving a Molotov Cocktail might give one a certain cathartic pleasure, but it's a distraction from the real goal: organizing collectives and affinity groups to subvert capitalism and the State from the inside.

The silver lining in the economic collapse is that it gives us (well, the comrades on the hard left) a chance to radicalize the middle class. We failed miserably at the task in the 60s because of postwar affluence and cold war, but now both of those impediments are removed.

It's party time! Woohoo!

Until Jewish terrorists blew up the King David Hotel, terorrism was just small change. No mass media to carry the message. The King David Hotel was the 9/11 of its day with front page coverage all over the world. But since the neo cons blew up the Twin Towers terrorism has become loose change. A splatter movie with no subtitles. The terrorism of French anarchists is not 'terrorism as we know it'. The terrorism we know is state terror funded by taxpayers' money. For a while there it was all the rage. Now it's become more or less an Israeli thing again.

and "we won't let us change our way of living" ... and yet, of course, we have ... one 09/11 and we turned ourselves inside out.

IMHO, Bin Laden's goal on 09/11 two fold -- to make us acknowledge his several-year-old declaration of war which would make him an actor on the world stage -- and to marshal the forces of Islam behind himself ... His (rational) objectives were not "to destroy the United States" (even if post-09/11 panic put a temporary dent in the economy). I think that 09/11 succeeded vastly beyond Al-Qaeda's wildest dreams. Who could have guessed that we'd have gone into a months long national tizzy? (Of course the unitary executive/PNAC folks saw this as an immense opportunity to grab power and push their agenda -- shock doctrine, indeed.)

By success, I mean that successful operations increase the enthusiasm of the terrorist's supporters. The embolden and encourage the resistance -- not that they achieve some incremental advance. The same is true for mass demonstrations ... yes, the might impress a few "undecideds" but mostly they create sense of community and strength and purpose among their participants.

There doesn't seem to be anyway around all the infighting -- the movie Red depicts the Russian excruciating post-revolutionary minutia parsing ... even our own pre- and post-revolutionary periods were hardly harmonious (well depicted in the John Adams miniseries).

It's desperately hard for disenfranchised, marginalized groups to get any "air time" ... and most acts seem to be seeking just that.

I'm no advocate of terrorism and I fear American grass roots vigilantism enormously. I'm among those nervous nellies wrt to the future of America and, particularly after the past 8 years, I respect and fear the power of terrorism to terrorize more than I fear any particular act.

we could learn a thing or two.

Lack of standards.

Ironically, since they hypocritically preach sexual morality.

But basically, for thirty years, no Republican has had the guts to stand up to anything from the right, no matter how hateful, no matter how violent, no matter how loony. Anyone who hated "the liberals" was okay.

And "liberal" who grovels and apologizes for terrorism is behaving the same way.

No matter how difficult your situation is, no matter how oppressed you are, no matter how much you hate the people I also oppose, killing, torturing, or maiming harmless people is always wrong.

If you don't get that, you're not really a liberal. You're someone who allows resentment to over-ride fundamental human decency.

Since I seem to be the only one making this obvious point, I'll make it this one more time before being done with this thread.

Although there were anarchists who introduced terrorism in the 1890's, it is important to remember that the basis for the philosophy lies in the following concept: if human beings could concern themselves with caring for one another then we would not need "government(s)". A supremely idealistic notion, which, of course, could not be realized, since many governments were already firmly established.

The great French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, was an anarchist. His belief was that we should love one another. He did not believe in the terrorist aspects of the philosophy (at least not to my knowledge) and what remains of his beliefs are the brilliant photographs of humans in so many conditions, captured by his instinctive eye.

Contemporary media always seem to portray anarchists as those who throw the bombs - the terrorists. But it is, indeed, a onesided view of the philosophy of anarchism.