Posted on 04/11/2002 2:15:10 PM PDT by H.R. Gross
The headline was "100,000 People Perished, but Who Remembers?" Appearing in The New York Times on March 14, it perfectly captured the essence of a powerful report from Tokyo about the forgotten victims of March 10, 1945, when, as the Times correspondent Howard French wrote, "a fleet of American B-29 bombers dropped 1,665 tons of napalm-filled bombs on Tokyo."
Sixteen square miles of the city went up in flames and 100,000 perished in a single night. Although scores of similar incendiary raids on Japanese cities followed, their memory, even in Japan, seems to have been obliterated by the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Among one group, however, the memory was not lost: philosophers, theologians and military and political leaders concerned with the ethics of warfare. They have long considered those raids leading examples of how a well-established moral principle, forbidding direct attacks on civilian populations, collapsed.
The breakdown began earlier, with the British decision to terror bomb German cities in reprisal for the London blitz, and ended in the nuclear strategy of massive retaliation. To the defense that direct and indiscriminate attacks on civilians can ultimately end wars sooner and thus spare lives, most moralists have replied that the end does not justify the means.
Recently "who remembers?" has become a question pertinent to debates over the war in Afghanistan and more recently in the Middle East. Those who do remember can only blink their eyes at the fierce charges and countercharges last year over incidents involving Afghan civilian deaths numbered in two digits. At the same time, television documentaries on biological warfare were showing how only a few decades ago American war planners (and Soviet ones as well) were devising weapons and strategies that would have indiscriminately wiped out civilians by the tens of millions.
Determining the numbers and causes of civilian casualties in Afghanistan as precisely as possible is important, but it already seems indisputable that the United States military not only rejected direct attacks on civilians but also strove mightily to avoid what is antiseptically termed "collateral damage" — and that this represents a major reversal of earlier attitudes.
When opponents of American actions in Afghanistan, as well as in the Persian Gulf and Kosovo, refuse to acknowledge any progress in this area, it suggests that their concern about the fate of civilians cloaks an opposition springing fundamentally from other sources.
That is a complaint of Michael Walzer, the political theorist whose widely used study "Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations" (Basic Books) strongly defended the principle that civilians should be immune from direct attack.
Writing in the spring issue of Dissent magazine, Mr. Walzer challenges the unqualified demand that any response to the terrorism of Sept. 11 had to avoid endangering civilians. This demand, he says, was simply "intended to make fighting impossible."
"I haven't come across any arguments," he writes, "that seriously tried to describe how this (or any) war could be fought without putting civilians at risk, or to ask what degree of risk might be permissible, or to specify the risks that American soldiers should accept in order to reduce the risk of civilian deaths.
"All these were legitimate issues in Afghanistan, as they were in the Kosovo and Gulf wars," he continues, but not issues really confronted by demonstrators chanting "Stop the bombing."
Mr. Walzer is ultimately more interested in addressing left-wing attitudes toward the United States than in the soundness of current moral debates about war and peace.
But the integrity of moral discourse about warfare is surely threatened when concern about civilians ceases to have much to do with what is happening on the ground but instead becomes an instrument to support a prior condemnation of all war, or at least all American war. It begins to look like the military is taking the principle of civilian immunity more seriously than many war critics.
On the other hand, one can say that it is easy for the armed forces to agree that the end doesn't justify the means now that smart bombs and other technological advances in weaponry have supplied new means for discriminating between military and civilian targets. What will the United States do if it faces a situation where these new options don't work?
That is exactly the challenge posed by the suicide bombings in the Middle East. A few have been aimed at military targets but most, like the Netanya hotel bombing on the first night of Passover, have been as pure examples of directly attacking civilians as one could conceive.
Defenders of these actions maintain that these are the only effective means that Palestinians possess in the face of overwhelming Israeli military power. What is more, defenders of suicide bombers — "martyrs" would be the language they prefer — argue that they have still not caused as many civilian casualties as the "collateral damage" of Israeli military actions. Those defenders would be incensed by the idea that their small-scale actions, however lethal, represent the same kind of immorality as the destruction of 100,000 lives in a raging inferno.
Those are not things said out loud in Europe and the United States. But they are tempting thoughts to those who identify strongly with Palestinian frustrations and perhaps even to some who feel that a greater balance of power between Palestinians and Israelis could actually force a settlement.
The questions posed by that temptation could not be more basic: Is the moral line against directly attacking civilians going to be crossed once again to fit the circumstances? Does the end justify the means? Who remembers?
These peaceniks are the next generation of "cattle" who will be the first in line when the dictators start lining people up for the boxcar ride to the extermination camp.
I must say that the idea of the Palestinians having equal military power with the Israelis is a nightmare to contemplate. Does anyone think they would have failed to used "the bomb" if they had it? Whew, this is a chaming thought that this writer must have overlooked to about the same degree he missed the other points in his commentary.
I'm really sick and tired of people trying to spin current Israeli actions as attacks on innocent civilians. Does anyone think the men holed up with Arafat are innocents? Does anyone think that those holed up in Bethleham are innocent civilians? Do they think that all people who are shooting at the Israelis and killed, are simply innocents?
This is a cock and bull pipe dream. I'm tired of hearing it fronted as fact.
Thanks for the post.
When I was in high school, the local police department would display several totalled autos in front of the school each spring about prom time as a warning against drinking and driving. I think the impact saved lives.
All high school students should visit an exact replica of a concentration camp as General Eisenhower saw it in 1945. The victims could be wax figures, but the smell and the sound of suffering could be added by Steven Spielberg's buddies.
I'm not going to say whether or not I agree with this.
I just have one question: If the same were done to us, would you accept this as a valid defense from an enemy officer at a war crimes trial? Would you acquit an enemy officer who ordered such attacks against us?
Please don't take this as an attack on you. I'm just curious if this cuts both ways.
If other freepers have opinions on this, I'd like to hear them.
The A-Bomb was our last-ditch effort to avoid having to do this.
Check out the Autumn 1997 issue of Military History Quarterly for the article by Norman Polmar and Thomas Allen.
You can read a discussion of the implications of our prospective genocide of Japan by going to Google Advanced Groups search at:
http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search
and do a search for the "Exact Phrase" A Study of the Possible Use of Toxic Gas in Operation Olympic.
The Emperor of Japan ordered a surrender because he knew we really would kill all of them.
He realized that when he left his palace after our first big fire-bombing raid on Tokyo to inspect the piles of charred, smoking bodies in the streets, and the piles of boiled corpses in what had become totally dry rivers, streams and ponds. A Torch to the Enemy by Martin Caidin.
Japan surrendered because the United States committed deliberate atrocities and war crimes (our fire-bomb and nuclear raids really were that) to shock Japan into surrender. We gave them two alternatives - genocide or surrender. And we posed a credible threat of genocide because we had already started doing that to Japan.
The Japanese gave orders about the same time to commit genocide on all the Allied civilians they could catch in occupied China, the East Indies, etc. IMO they'd have killed several million people a week for months - say 50 million people, about as many as had died in all of World War Two before then. Not counting the 20-30 million Japanese who would have died of gas attack, starvation, disease, napalm and ground fighting during the US invasion.
The Imperial Japanese Army was as evil an institution as the SS, and more lethal.
American fire-bombing attacks on Japan, and nuking of two of its cities, saved at least a 100-150 lives, mostly Chinese but including 20 million plus Japanese, for every Japanese who died in the fireboming and nukes.
So atrocities, war crimes and terror have a place in statecraft. The way to not lose one's moral place is to not start doing those, but when the other side does, finish it, finish it fast, and win.
The United States has known this for a long time - it's in the institutional DNA of our armed forces. From page 510 of The Journal of Military History's April 2002 issue (the current one):
"The Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field, more commonly referred to as General Orders 100, were first issued in 1863 at the height of the Civil War and reissued periodically to American combat forces for the next four decades. ...
...
If the opponent's citizenry, once occupied, continued to resist, ... they broke the compact and became subject to "protective retribution." Moreover, the preservation of the nation was paramount and justified the killing of armed and -- if unavoidable -- unarmed opponents, the destruction of private property, and the devastation of the enemy's countryside in the name of "military necessity."
The Israelis have been too squeamish about this, IMO, because they're, well, Jewish. But they'll get over that and do what they have to in order to win.
Sounds legit to me. All Israel has to use are remotely detonated car bombs . No Israeli needs to die or suicide himself.
I wonder what the new UN War Crimes "law" would say about that. Is it a crime against humanity to intentionally send a youngster to do something like that?
The workers in the World Trade Center were making a fortune for Uncle Sam, and helping him to project his power around the world. That attack was not a criminal matter, it was an act of war. Now we have to root out and destroy our enemy every bit as ruthlessly as they've attacked us.
But seeing as how I would be on the front lines, doing my level best to ensure that they don't come here and do that, I expect support not exacerbation of the situation by some wimp who doesn't even have the guts to put his/her own ass on the line. You can say that my years on active duty have made me cynical about most Americans and those "peacable" turds. They are the ones who tend to suck the life blood of the strong virulent men who've kept this country free.
I'm sure you would do your absolute best to prevent the same from happening to us. Please accept my thanks and gratitude for your service to our country.
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