Again: Your point is that you are principally against killing US citizens in organisations that do violence against USA -- as long as the organisations aren't countries which you can declare war against.

One word: Weird. You say a country should never defend itself with military against violent citizens which become e.g. Somali warlords, join Pakistani tribal warfare clans or terrorist groups? (Not even the heavily armed US police can handle all threats smaller than country size.)

Anyway, my argument was that there are arguably even worse reactions to extreme terror from US and other democracies. This is probably built into the democratic system -- scare voters enough and countries will react badly. You don't have to like it.

But I think you understood that.

Edit: If you really don't understand -- you argue for a position by morality. I argue it is irrelevant, both for practical reasons and because of how democracies react to terror. Being Swedish I'm fed up with decisions based only on idealist wishful thinking, so I'm sorry if I sound irritated.

I don't mean to irritate you -- I find it interesting you're Swedish -- I assumed you were an American (very American of me, I know.)

I'm not a pie in the sky idealist. I consider myself fairly pragmatic, but I expect the President to abide by laws, and I expect my citizenship to afford me protections.

I haven't shed a tear over al-Awlaki, I assure you. But either he should have been adjudicated as an enemy combatant or judicially stripped of his citizenship or tried for treason in absentia.

It seems to me like your endorsing a rule of men rather than a rule of law. The problem with that is that it seems well and good when you've Julius and Augustus running the show, but when Nero and Caligula show up it's not so easy to go back.

If I should put it simpler, in terms that is easy for you:

You accept military solutions for combatants (combatants or in e.g. logistics) in conflicts with states.

There are often no simple categories as either countries or individuals. There is a big grey area, just consider deniability (e.g. should Hezbollah be seen as another branch of the Iranian rep guard? A proxy? Does anyone know, except maybe the Hezbollah boss?). So there will be cases where military solutions are relevant, even when it strictly aren't any countries involved (at least officially).

In the Middle East, this is especially obvious with more or less clans controlling countries.

For another example, Pakistan grows and deploys terrorist groups as if they were special forces (while vehemently denying it).

So the problem here is you building a moral standpoint of a simplified world view -- X wasn't in a declared war, so it is murder. It just isn't that simple, says 5 minutes of thought.

I get what you say, e.g. the NSA is not a practical problem as long as there isn't a McCarthy and economic depression scenario. Then you would literally risk a 1984 scenario.

Point is, your distinction re "real" war definition with countries is not working.

(The Taliban, for instance, is more or less a real guerrilla army with state backing. Almost all larger terror groups get unofficial state support from somewhere.)

Countries can be seen (and typically behave) as unusually big clans that do clan warfare. That the states wrote specific legal protections for themselves, compared to smaller clans, doesn't make them fundamentally different.