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Although I’m sure you didn’t mean it, your post sounds like we had some culpability for the subsequent Japanese butchery, we did not. The horrors and atrocities committed by the Japanese in response to that raid and for the help the Chinese gave our downed American pilots is solely the responsibility of Japan.

Even as the US anticipated a vicious response against China by Japan, I agree that the crimes committed by the Japanese are solely the responsibility of the Japanese that committed them; I am in no way implying any guilt by association.

I would only point out whatever we gained by that raid was overwhelmed by the Chinese blood lost in response to it; had the prediction of 250,000 dead Chinese ever come up before the raid, it would have been immoral to carry it out, as it would have failed the proportionality test.

The problem with that line of thinking is that the Japanese were killing the Chinese in job lots long before the raid and continued after.

It is sort of along the lines of, "because you told Jane her job performance sucked she went home and beat her kids".

Jane has been beating her kids since they were born and will continue to do so until she is dead, they are dead or she is in jail.

Evil people do evil things.

And if the Japanese threatened to kill a million Chinese for every island we retook from them, should we have sued for peace and let them keep what they murdered to take?

We were attacked, our possessions taken, and our people killed. We were at war, and letting them subjugate the world because of what we were afraid they might do, would have been, in my mind, a greater immorality.

Welcome to the kingdom of historical armchair quarterbacks ever ready to denigrate or minimize the courage, integrity, stamina, and creativity of Americans in order to imply they bear responsibility for the murderous actions of others.

That’s precisely the logic leftists use, and which has proven time and time again to be flawed. Not a single attempt to prevent or dissuade an aggrieved group from immoral choices — be they German, Japanese, African American, or Hispanic — has ever succeeded.

The raid showed the Japanese that Americans would not cower in the face of their amoral ferocity. The Japanese were looking for any excuse to murder Chinese (Rape of Nanjing), and your supposition that those 250,000 would not have died may be partially true, but only because the Japanese are more likely than not to have found some other excuse to kill just as many.

Every sword has two edges, and I’m sick of people who call themselves conservatives denigrating a heroic mission because they think they know what might have happened otherwise. You have NO IDEA of what horrors that raid prevented.