I’m not talking about blame here.
I’m talking about responsibility. Those civilians died in the legitimate course of war.
Whether or not the war is legitimate is a different matter. The soldiers were acting well within reasonable limits, and any consequences of the military action, is the responsibility of the politicians who ordered the war in the first palce.
Of course. Killing someone for what they do is much better than killing them for where they live.
I don’t know whether it’s hubris or shame that makes people think that so much is unique to the twentieth and twenty first century, but it’s certainly not true that industrialization created the concept of total war. Medieval armies beseiging a city would often attack nearby towns to drive the inhabitants into the city, straining the city’s resources. And Rome’s war against Carthage seems like the epitome of total war to me.
Of course, neutral countries aren’t going about business as usual either. They’re building the tanks, planes, and battleships to sell to the warring nations. Is it moral to bomb them?
On the contrary, that’s about the longest way of ending a war. Which is more of a threat: a country with no army, but plenty of manufacturing capacity, or a country with a very strong army, but no manufacturing capacity? In the long run the former, in the short run the latter. So if you seek the latter, you are clearly looking in the long run, i.e. you are planning on waging a long term war. No one in their right mind who expects to win a war within a few months is going to waste time attacking what will not be threat until several years from now.
WHAT!!!? Just how many tanks do you think Iraq actually made? Iraq bought its army. If we had faced tanks built by Iraq, we probably wouldn’t have bothered bombing them. Even if Iraq had built their own tanks, how many do you think they could have built in a few months? The bombing targets in Desert Storm were infrastructure targets like radar installations. Bombing manufacturing centers would do nothing to further the goals of the war.
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*Originally posted by MGibson *
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Try:
1/ Waging an aggressive war outside the terms of the Geneva Convention
2/ Carpet bombing
3/ Use of napalm against civilian settlements.
It is useful to remember that powerful nations and victorious nations are not brought to book over war crimes. If a leader of a less powerful nation had waged an aggressive war, carpet bombed cities and used napalm against villages, and then gone on to lose a war, they would have been charged with war crimes. The US will never be so charged as its power enables it to control the very instruments of international law which are meant to carry out such investigations.
And by the way, I do know that demonization of the enemy in time of war is the norm: it still does not excuse governments from responsibility for horrific acts encouraged by such demonization.
Freedom:
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. When Nixon and Kissinger order Operation Rolling Thunder with the intent of killing thousands of civilians, that is their responsibility. When Marshall and various British military leaders order the unnecessary and irresponsible fire-bombing of Dresden, the responsibility is squarely on their shoulders.
NOTE: If I’m wrong, and the politicians (i.e. Roosevelt [Truman?] and Churchill) personally ordered Dresden, please correct me. Even if my examples are wrong, however, I still think my point is valid.
Joe Cool, if you’re still checking this thread, do you feel like responding to my post? I’d greatly appreciate it.
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Can you be a bit more specific about what part of the Geneva Convention was broken. It is a fairly large document. Also since when was the US the aggressor? As I recall we were aiding South Viet-Nam not just invading a country without an invitation.
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Since when was carpet bombing illegal? And since a lot of areas were full of VC they were legitimate targets.
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You sure all those civillian settlements didn’t contain VC elements?
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That’s true. The only time someone is brought to justice is if they’re in a weak position. Saddam probably isn’t ever going to get into trouble.
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Maybe.
Unless there’s a general policy that violates law, such as executing all POWs, then I’m not going to hold politicans responsible for the war crimes of a few individuals.
Marc
Read and consider:
http://www2.prestel.co.uk/littleton/v1!!cho1.htm
You may disagree with the politics of the people involved, but they did adduce irrefutable evidence of war crimes.
It may well have been justifiable in terms of US goals at the time, but an independent assessment would almost certainly have concluded that major war crimes were committted.
You take steps not to let it happen, and if it does, then you deal with it as a consequence of war.
War is even less horrible when nobody is killed. So why don’t we all just get together and play checkers to see who gets to keep Poland? Then won’t everybody be happy?
As several people have already stated, bombing three Japanese cities had very visible strategic benefits (Yes, I said three. Tokyo was bombed as well): Withdrawing of forces, and an unconditional surrender. If you don’t like it, then work to prevent war. Pretending that there are rules to be followed is just silly. Because our modern enemies aren’t under any such illusion.
Disregarding both. I was actually using Vietnam as an example of how low civilian morale will effectively cripple an otherwise strong enemy.
I was also talking about the fact that we did not fully commit to the war in Vietnam, with half the population whining about how we should get out, half whining about how we were defending freedom, and the other half arguing over whose fault it is (yes, it’s on purpose). Once you’re there, commit. Once troops are already over there and dying, the time to argue about why is over. If the U.S. had fully committed to the effort, we would not have slunk away with tail between legs.
And if we had fully committed, we would have realized that the population is who we were fighting. When women and children are coming out of huts with machine guns and killing soldiers, it’s obvious that there is no such thing as a noncombatant.
Any force that invades the U.S. would be wise to remember that and act accordingly, because civilian resistance would be much, much more severe here than it was there.
If you want to nitpick, we were wrong to be bombing anything in Sarajevo, as it was a domestic issue and it is not our job to babysit the world.
But that’s just my $.02.
If you initiate the use of NBC warefare, there are no steps to be taken to prevent your opponant from doing the same (provided they have the weapons, of course). If you inconvenience them; they have everything to gain by inconveniencing you.
“then you deal with it as a consequence of war.” Ok, but the whole point is to avoid it in the first place. NBC warefare becomes a nuisence more so to the attacker than the defender. There really is no point in using NBC warefare, save in a nation’s death throws. The mid-term “consequences” of NBC are to slow things down and make everything more difficult, needlessly.
“War is even less horrible when nobody is killed. So why don’t we all just get together and play checkers to see who gets to keep Poland? Then won’t everybody be happy?”
This is hardly the point, and you know it just as well as everyone else here knows it. Needless killing of civillians should be avoided. The bombing of Tokyo did nothing to convince Japan to surrender. The nukes did it all on their own. And this TRULY is a special case. It wasn’t the destructive effect of the A-bombs so much as the psychological shock amongst the leadership: that one plane could now do what used to take fleets of bombers to accomplish. The point being, had we fire bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the same death toll, it likely would not have ended the war. In other words, to attempt justify your position through inclusion of the Tokyo raids is flawed by it’s lack of differentiation between the impact of the two types of bombing on the decision making process amongst the Japanese leadership.
“When women and children are coming out of huts with machine guns and killing soldiers, it’s obvious that there is no such thing as a noncombatant.”
In that case, the only way to win would be to kill every man, woman, and child. This would be the only way to fully commit. If you must wipe out the entire population to “win”, however, wouldn’t this suggest that there’s nothing to be won? It’s difficult to “protect” a population from itself by destroying it. I noticed that you included your objection to American intervention in Kosovo, but not to our intervention in Vietnam. Was that an oversight, or do you believe the US should have intervened given a full committment in whatever form you see fit? Quite frankly, I agree with some who argue that US involvement in the Vietnam War could have ended quickly given a “full commitment” to the end of invading NV and passing occupation to the south. We could have left them to fight a limited war against insurgents with little in the way of a “base of operations” (NV). I don’t believe, however, that we did any good. Vietnem needed Ho Chi Mihn at that time. All we did was delay the inevitable democratization of Vietnam under her own volition by 2 decades and kill a couple million Vietnamese and 58k Americans. Was it, then, our job to babysit (as you put it) South Vietnam?
Bombing civillians has historically had the DIRECT OPPOSITE effects they were intended to have. They don’t lower morale, they bolster it. This is true from the Zepelin raids of WWI to the dropping of bridges in Bosnia. All ethics aside, deliberately attacking civillian to affect public opinion in your favor and/or affect production is bad military policy.
The two examples I gave of secondary effects that turned out to be the only effects of American bombing in WW2 could probably also have been just as effective if the targets were changed from cities to airfields. Rolling thunder, linebacker, and the New Jersey’s 16inch escapades are all creditied with bringing the NV to the peace tables. I think it’s safe to say, history has passed judgement on the “peace talks”. They were little more than moves to buy time. Time to set up more SAM sites; time to extract beleaguered NVA troops. Seeing as how the provoked peace talks were disingenuous to begin with, and only served to aid the North Vietnamese they can hardly be called victories of strategic bombing.
Moreover, modern technology really allows us to avoid deliberate attacks on civillians. And so, in some sense the issue is moot. There’s no need to do it. It’s ethically dubious at best. And it has proven, against the most stubborn proponents, to have overwhelmingly deliterious effects on one’s war effort.
“But that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong. America give us a call at…”
I agree with this…
I agree here as well. I don’t agree however, that firebombing would not have gained the same objective. Bombing raids on Tokyo showed the people of Japan that they were not immune to the effects of war, and the leadership were forced to pull forces back to protect their lands.
Yes it was most definitely an oversight. I don’t believe that Vietnam was our business. However, I also believe that once we were there, the time for debating whether we should be there had passed, and it was time to commit to the engagement. Do do otherwise is to endanger our troops. Which is exactly what happened.
So no, we shouldn’t have been there, but yes, once we were there, we should have committed fully.
Interesting post, by the way. I’ll read it a few more times before I respond again.
“27 July Togo leads a discussion in the “Supreme War Direction Council” Togo advocates acceptance of the ultimatum, and that is agreed upon, but then reversed. Togo wrote, “To my amazement, the newspapers of the following morning reported that the government had decided to ignore the Potsdam declaration.” He learned that a rump meeting of chiefs of staff and war ministers had swayed Suzuki. (Fogelman 74) This news got mistranslated into English as “unworthy of public notice,” which was taken by the pro-bomb parties in the US as an insult and a reason to go ahead with the bombing.”–taknen from: http://www.nd.edu/~theo/jhy/writings/justwar/hiroshima.htm
(sorry, I don’t know how to provide it in link form.)
This was before Hiroshima and after the effects of American raids had been felt. More searching will reveal spilts in the poiltical/military leadership, BUT also a dominance by the younger more fanatical military leadership. I can’t believe that the Japanese leadership would have caved in the face of “more of the same”.
As for Japanese force movements: they were hardly voluntary. The raids on Tokyo didn’t force Japan to redistribute forces to protect the mainland. The United States pushed them to thier homeland. They really had no other choice.