I respect your patriotism. I feel your passion and confusion. But I think you’ve missed a valuable point in all this: The Japanese were bombing Darwin in the Northern Territories of Australia – and running amok in New Guinea and other southern Indonesian islands at the very time when you say that they were basically a ‘spent force’ after Midway.

The fact is, the US had then – as it has today – a powerful military presense (in the form of spy bases, arms depots and naval stations) in Australia at that time.

Would they just ignore the Jap threat in that part of the world just because the US mainland was no longer under threat? I don’t think so.

The issue of “should the US have fire-bombed and later nuked Japanese cities”, in my view, is a very mute point. It was done. The Japs surrendered. Today, in 2012, Japan is a thriving economy and a key global trading partner.

I say… end the confusion. Let it go. it’s “history”.

Although ANY DEATH from terrorism is one death too many we are still a far cry from the death tolls of WWII. I have no doubt that the extreme level of carnage during the Second World War lead to decisions that were intended to bring an end to the conflict by any means possible. Horrific decisions were made in the midst of horrible times. Who are we to judge them in hindsight?

How could we remotely consider, much less justify, using such massive and deadly retribution tactics with commensurate civilan casualties in response to such relatively modest losses?

Being scared of what terrorists might do isn’t a good enough reason.
……………………………………………………………………..

Actual stats:

2,726 US civilian Dead from World Trade Center attack

2,849 US Miliatary Dead in Iraq

Total American deaths to date: 5575
————————————–

World War II

United States:

407,300 Military Dead
11,200 Civilian Dead

Japan:

2,000,000 Military Dead
600,000 Civilian Dead

By comparison:

Soviet Union

10,700,000 Military Dead
11,500,000 Civilian Dead

Germany

5,500,000 Military Dead
1,840,000 Civilian Dead

Propaganda of the era tended to dehumanize the enemy – particularly the Japanese. Blatant racism was still very evident in the America of those times and the Japanese met all the qualifications to be bitterly hated and despised. Small wonder that our military leaders could make decisions that lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians as long as it fulfilled our objective to end the war as quickly as possible. I seriously doubt that there were many Americans at that time who felt a great deal of empathy for the Japanese dead – that empathy was reserved for the deaths of our own soldiers and there were plenty of those deaths to go around.

In hindsight, here in the 21st Century it may be easy for us to condemn those actions as murderous and inhumane. Certainly and undeniably they were – but then such is the nature of total war.

We may be in a total war with Muslim extremists at this time but they have not done us the favor of gathering within the borders of one single nation so that we might descend on them from the sky with firebombs or nuclear weapons. They are minorities hidden and intermingled with civilian populations of several nations around the world. They do not have well organized war machines like the Germans or the Japanese in WWII. They do not have millions of uniformed soldiers equipped with modern weaponry as did the soldiers of those nations way back then.

Although some amongst us would like very much to include ALL Muslims as the target of our anti-terrorism efforts it simply is not the case. We are not threatened by all Muslims – only a few. However, what does appear to be the case is that too many amongst us still carry the bias and bigotry that helped our forefathers to justify the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.

Times have changed – people have changed. We must adapt to those changes in order to fight this problem. Relying on our big hammer nukes to deal with a problem that requires surgical technique will not suffice – even if some amongst us would feel vindicated at the thought of using them to destroy those they feel are subhuman or racially inferior.

We cannot use simple solutions to solve complex problems no matter how gratifying the thought might be.

Some thoughts on the initial question of the “morality” of US targeting of civilian poulations in Japan (and Allied targeting in places like Dresden I would suppose) I think its helpful to view war as a tactic, a tool for the acheivement of some goal (many have also suggested that this is exactly how terrorism should be viewed as well).

We fought WWII using the specific sort of tool known as “total war”, wherein we sought not just to win mere strategic geographical objectives, but to entirely eliminate our enemies’ capacity to wage, or even contemplate waging war. We were seeking to crush our enemies’ wills.

Now total war is a terrible thing, a sloppy and dangerous tool indeed, which, once released, will neccesarily will inflict horrendous casualties on civilian populations.

But if you accept that the defeat of the agressively militaristic and expansionist regimes of Hitler’s Germany and Hirohito’s Japan was an existential imperative for the Allies, and that the tool called total war was the only way to achieve this imperative, then its use was inevitable.

Is the inevitable subject to “morality”? Can it be?

I posit that moral considerations were on point only in the decision whether to wage this war, and this sort of war, or not.

And it seems to me that this applies today, that the overarching moral decisions regarding are made (consciously or not) at the outset of a war.

Whether to wage war at all. And if so how it should be waged.

Which is one of the reasons our current adventure in Iraq so pisses me off.

The decision to go to war is an enormously important moral decision.

And in a democracy that aspires to morality (and makes rather a point of crowing about it) shouldn’t such a decision be made on the best available information?

I, and I suspect many Americans feel they were mislead.

That the administration purposefully exagerrated the immediate threat posed by Saddam’s Iraq.

That the administration purposely conflated (Bush’s recent disingenuous denials not notwithstanding) Iraq with the attacks of 9/11.

That the administration consistently low-balled the costs of this war, to our soldiers, to our treasury, and, ironically I suppose, to our moral standing in the world.

And whether these last were done in good faith or not, I find it particularly galling that NONE of the leadership responsible have been held to account.

I also find it extremely worrisome that, faced with electoral defeat, Republicans are ratcheting up their rhetoric by conflating our WWII and Cold War struggles, with our current need to defend ourselves against the tactic of terrorism.

If such comparisons are being made disingenuosly (frankly my hope) then they are merely despicable.

But if they are being made in earnest then our country is facing moral decisions akin to those which we faced at the outset of WWII.

I hope the decisions we make are ones our children and grandchildren can live with.

“The fact that people like Sideways keep agonizing over the actions of their country decades later indicates to me that, yes, we did the right thing.”

Now you say:
“A system like [ours] is bound to make as right a decision as it can, nearly every time, and furthermore, is bound to learn from past bad decisions, provided it’s populace keeps its perspective.”

The existence of “past bad decisions” contradicts your original assertion that our healthy democracy proves the morality of the WWII decisions, which could arguably be called “bad” (although not by me).

Probiglio,
You seem to have restated my point while claiming to refute it. If morality is created by the winner, is this not relativism?

On fascism, I agree with you. In “Islamic fascists” it has lost all of its original sense and now means little more than “really really bad guys.”

Not at all JLA – the morality of history is created by the “winner”. That is the point you, and so very many others, have missed. Had the Allies not “won” in WW2, this world would be much different.

Not better, just different.

Justin – on the topic of buzz-words.

I agree with the direction you are facing. It is a small part of the process of de-humanising an enemy.

Memories of WW2 are still strong enough that “fascist” means much to the public psyche – as it should. Making the connection between that memory of the past and the politics of the present in one word is a powerful propaganda tool; one of the best.

Does anybody know what an Islamic Fascist is?

Some think they do…but is it all buzz words?

Jim

The biggest “gotcha” I see there is “[t]hirty new terrorist organizations have emerged since the September 11, 2001, attacks”. The rest is mainly just analysis of the threat.

First of all, I’m not convinced that “emerged” means “come into being”. Given language I’ve read in similar reports, it could also mean “became known”. Some of those organizations may already have been around.

Furthermore, it could well mean that the power of thirty terrorist organizations has grown – but I highly doubt that they grew faster than the power of existing terrorist organizations has declined.

I’m more inclined to believe what I believed in 2001 – that this will be a decades-long struggle, against not so much an enemy, but a tactic, with which we are newly familar, and that we could be said to be still in the learning and planning stage.

I sincerely believe our culture is blessed, in that it fosters such vibrant introspection on the part of every citizen. We feel as if we inherit the sins and fortunes of our national ancestors as no other nation does. Slavery? Us. Trail of tears? Us. Manifest Destiny? Us. Largest economy on the planet? All us. Every war, every invention, everything. We don’t seem to blame our governments as much as we could. We see ourselves as being in the driver’s seat.

This means that any national action we take tends to be inspected by everyone with a political axe in excruciatingly detail. That inspection plays forward; we examine every future option in similar detail.

The actual decisions are made by our delegates, not us, but they are still delegates we choose. A system like that is bound to make as right a decision as it can, nearly every time, and furthermore, is bound to learn from past bad decisions, provided it’s populace keeps its perspective.

And Jimmy…people aren’t going to stop whining about a war in which we’re being given platitudes instead of planning. Just in case you haven’t noticed, terrorism has grown since 9/11, not declined, so forgive us if we’re questioning The Bush Doctrine’s take of combating terrorism and its chances for effectiveness. I’m certainly not suggesting it’s responsible for the growth, but if it isn’t curbing it, should we keep doing the same thing? I think it’s become fairly obvious it’s flawed precisely because it’s 1940s era thinking, and we simply can’t get away with what we could back then.

Again, it’s all about the money. We need their oil so we have to give them money and then they fund terrorism. And if we’re not giving them money, then another country is because, frankly, we tie up a lot of the oil in this country and other countries need it to compete so they have to do deals with states like Iran, etc. We keep focusing on cutting off a different one of the hydra’s many heads, when what we should be aiming for is the heart.

Where I think you’re getting confused – we live in a way different time and culture. You’re thinking with your 21st century mind and life experience so no wonder you question the decision. There were at least a million American serviceman and their families who were more than pleased with that decision as it saved them from having to invade Japan and fight a conventional war for who knows how many more years. The terms for surrender were unconditional. Japan could have stopped the war but chose not to. Is that our fault? Maybe in today’s world it would be but not back then.

In today’s America, it will take a nuke or other WMD mass murder in a major American city to get us to that level of resolve. I’m undecided if that’s a good thing. Restraint is always good but there’s a thin line between that and acting naive and stupid. Are we willing to risk the WMD while we wait for the Islamic states to grow up and act like adults?

If we wait and the worst thing happens, whose fault is that? Will it be worth it such that 65 years from now people will think we were so wonderful for our patience and restraint or how we chose appeasement because we didn’t want any innocents to be killed? Or will they think we were idiots?

Glen Wishard’s argument is sound and his history accurate, except for the statement “Muslim military performance has been uniformly dismal since the great Saladin died.” Timur Leng, Selim Yavuz, Bayezid II, Babur etc. etc. might beg to differ. This mistake is not very important in this context, however, and does not detract from the basic point.

Probligo’s argument reflects a level of relativism which essentially rejects the notion of morality, even of the meta-ethical variety. For must of us, Nazi Germany and Britain were not equivalent actors.

Jimmy the Dhimmi misses the point of Justin’s admirable post entirely, IMO. When Justin suggested that nations would “wither away and die,” I understood him to mean regimes (correct me if I am wrong). You suggest that “all of these corrupt nations must somehow change;” Justin is saying the same thing, but he is a little more specific about the “somehow.” This is not at all a trivial point. You claim that “if all the western countries stop whining about 2003 justifications and “root causesâ€Â? of terror, and instead get behind the current effort, it may very well work.” My question for you is, HOW will it work? Somehow?

My two cents…

We responded to a direct act of war from a sovereign nation who made a decision to initiate war as a nation.

The difference in what is going on today is that we are fighting a war against a nation that did not attack us, in the hopes of killing an idea, which is not connected to any particular regime but rather to a religion and a way of life.

Apples do not equal oranges.

A more pertinent question for today would be, Are we justified in waging war on a nation where we knew (not, of they have WMD knew but really knew) Osama was hiding?

If I trusted our government, and I am finding that harder and harder to do as we go along, and believed not that Osama was hiding in the country but that the nation’s leaders had chosen to give him sanctuary then I believe military action might be permissible. But that is because, effectively, bin Laden declared war on the U.S. and a nation that is sheltering him would be considered a hostile nation. That is why I supported the attack on Afghanistan.

Iraq didn’t do diddly though.

Posted by the Lemming Herder from Don’t Be A Lemming!

so we can bankrupt these corrupt nations and force them to embrace captialism/equal rights or whither away and die.

1) No nation full of millions of people will simply wither away and die, unless you plan on starving them to death (we sort of tried that with Iraq for 12 years). What is most important is that all of these corrupt nations must somehow change so as to persecute terror instead of supporting it.

how can we honestly keep countries from getting this technology? The answer is pretty straightforward…we can’t. So we’re going to have to come up with better ideas than “This person can not have a nuke.� Any ideas?

2) Do what was said in (1) above first, so that every Islamic nation becomes like Nuclear Britain. Radical Muslims in its midst, yet constantly persecuted with the full power of government.

A geopolitical paradigm shift is required very soon in the middle east, before every terror state gets nukes. Bush decided Iraq would be where we drive the stake first, and if all the western countries stop whining about 2003 justifications and “root causes” of terror, and instead get behind the current effort, it may very well work.

Would the bombing of Tokyo, the firestorm bombing, still be considered moral had the Allies not defeated Japan.

The parallel, the equivalent -

Do you believe the German carpet-bombing of London and the East End inparticular was a legitimate war action?

For surely the truth is that the morality of military action depends entirely upon who won rather than the means by which the win was attained?