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.
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.
Happening in Venezuela even as I type this.
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on the other hand, did bring the war to an end. The did have an appreciable effect on the war and, because they saved countless more lives than were lost, they can even be seen as humanitarian. Not so good if you happened to be in Hiroshima, but very good if you were going to have to attack or defend the invasion beaches in Japan.
Incidently, I don't think nukes would have the same effect today, except possibly in Western countries. Abombs were a surprise. Now people are used to the idea and might not surrender just because you knocked out a city or two.
It all depends on your historical perspective. As late as Shakespeare's time, putting a city to the sword for forcing one go through the trouble of taking it was acceptable. Genocide as the natural outcome of losing a war goes back to prehistory. Check out the Bible. In fact, there are those who think we h.sapiens are responsible for the deliberate extinction of h.neanderthalis.
Therefore, the real question is not why the distinction between civilians and combatants became so blurred in the second half of the 20th Century. The question should be how and why did Western Civilization manage to maintain this distinction for about 500 years.