# Wass the USS Cole a Valid Target? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 16, 2000, 4:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wass-the-uss-cole-a-valid-target/37090 "2000-10-16T04:49:53Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Rysdad](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/7cd45c/32.png) [@Rysdad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rysdad)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2000, 1:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wass-the-uss-cole-a-valid-target/37090/21 "2000-10-17T01:26:44Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Myrr21 \* > \*\* > > > [@](#): > > > > The problem with combatants disguising themselves as non-combatants is that it makes _all_ non-combatants suspicious and legitimate targets. The reason not to do it is to protect your own people, not the enemy. > > Though I’d have to say it worked pretty well for the Viet Cong… > \*\* But it worked out pretty poorly for the Vietnamese civilians. That’s the point. ---
**Author:** ![tracer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tracer/32/20578_2.png) [@tracer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tracer)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2000, 2:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wass-the-uss-cole-a-valid-target/37090/22 "2000-10-17T02:00:15Z")
Freedom2 wrote: > [@](#): > > Certainly I think that anyone who would bomb with the intent to harm civilians from afar was cowardly. Does that include the many allied aerial bombing attacks on civilian targets in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during WW2? ---
**Author:** ![Spiny\_Norman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9de0a6/32.png) [@Spiny\_Norman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spiny_Norman)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2000, 9:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wass-the-uss-cole-a-valid-target/37090/23 "2000-10-17T09:29:38Z")
So now we’re juggling international law, the Geneva conventions, terrorism and - if memory serves me - the St. Petersburg Declaration, which together with the Hague Land War convention puts restrictions on weapons types and use. My head hurts. To get the banal hypothetical case out of the way: If the attack on the USS Cole was carried out by soldiers taking orders from a country at war with the US, and if those soldiers had not been hiding their combattant status, the attack would probably have been a legal act of war. As this wasn’t the case, we’re left with the bizarre distinction between soldiers committing a war crime (posing as noncombattants) and terrorists committing a crime, period. TheRyan: > [@](#): > > Breaking international law and terrorism are hardly the same things. The attack on Pearl Harbor may have been illegal, but was it terrorism? If today’s media had existed back then, they probably would have been whining about the “terrorist” attack. But it wasn’t really. The Japanese planes made no effort to conceal who or what they were, neither did their carriers as they left port. So the conventions apparently weren’t broken, but international law, of course, was. S. Norman ---
**Author:** ![Kyberneticist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/dc4da7/32.png) [@Kyberneticist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kyberneticist)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2000, 12:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wass-the-uss-cole-a-valid-target/37090/24 "2000-10-17T12:55:02Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by tracer \* > \*\*Freedom2 wrote: > > > [@](#): > > > > Certainly I think that anyone who would bomb with the intent to harm civilians from afar was cowardly. > > Does that include the many allied aerial bombing attacks on civilian targets in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during WW2? \*\* Hey now, Dresden was a valid military target! Delicate porcelain could have been hurled at our troops if it wasn’t destroyed in a firestorm! [http://netjunk.com/users/library/dresden.htm](http://netjunk.com/users/library/dresden.htm) ---
**Author:** ![Kyberneticist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/dc4da7/32.png) [@Kyberneticist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kyberneticist)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2000, 2:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wass-the-uss-cole-a-valid-target/37090/25 "2000-10-18T02:55:17Z")
The title should have tipped me off. Ok, I did a quick net search to find somebody describing in reasonably vivid detail the horrific firebombing of Dresden (that screwed Kurt Vonnegaut up so much). This the link above does, and seems to match with what I’d read in other sources. However, this is the last paragraph (I hadn’t read to the end when posting). > [@](#): > > What you ought to take seriously, though, is the fact that the same clique that controlled the traitorous Roosevelt and Churchill governments, whose hatred of our race and civilization and whose alliance with Communism were the real causes of the holocaust of Dresden, still controls our government and our media today. It is they who are pushing for a disarmed, racially mixed America. It is they who promote the teaching of sodomy to our young children. It is > they who are destroying our industrial infrastructure in the name of a global economy. It is they who created the drug subculture and then also the police state agencies which pretend to fight it. The hour is very late for America and indeed for all of Western civilization. But if patriots will heed our call, then there is no reason for despair. For > the enemies of our nation may have power, but their power is based on lies. Won’t you help us cut through the chain of lies that holds our people in mental slavery? Anyway, just wanted to make it clear that while, yeah, I happen to feel the War on Drugs has been pretty much a flop, I’m not a big fan of racist conspiracy theories. Sorry about that. ---
**Author:** ![Fillet](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/2acd7d/32.png) [@Fillet](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fillet)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2000, 3:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wass-the-uss-cole-a-valid-target/37090/26 "2000-10-18T15:35:45Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Kyberneticist \* > \*\*Anyway, just wanted to make it clear that while, yeah, I happen to feel the War on Drugs has been pretty much a flop, I’m not a big fan of racist conspiracy theories. > Sorry about that. \*\* I can’t stand it when neo-Nazi jerks appropriate historic events to “back up” their cause, thus causing reasonable folks to reject the historic event itself. So for you, Kyberneticist, and anyone else with doubts about Dresden, here’s a relevant snippet from Allan Forbes’ piece, [“Atrocities”](http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR20.4/Forbes.html): > [@](#): > > A new and unforeseen weapon came into play at Hamburg–the firestorm. Martin Middlebrook describes one in The Battle of Hamburg. A thermal column of wind generated heat in excess of 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, melting trolley windows and the asphalt in streets, the wind uprooting trees. When people crossed a street, their feet stuck in the melted asphalt; they tried to extricate themselves with their hands, only to find them stuck as well. They remained on all fours screaming. Small children lay like “fried eels” on the pavement. The firestorm sucked all the oxygen out of the city; a 15 year-old girl said that the brains of people in shelters “tumbled from their burst temples and their insides [extruded] from the soft parts under the ribs.” Rhodes claims that Bomber Command killed at least 45,000 men, women, and children at Hamburg. By contrast, the bombing of Coventry killed 554 civilians and the heaviest raid on London 1,436. Civilian deaths in London during the nine months of the Blitz amounted to 20,083. > > Aerial slaughter in Europe reached a climax on 13-14 February 1945 at Dresden. The briefing for air crews misrepresented Dresden as “an industrial city of first-class importance.” Dresden had always been a center of art and artists, one of Europe’s most magnificent cities, itself a work of art; Dresden’s “heavy” industry was the manufacture of porcelain shepherds and shepherdesses. Other industries, according to Kurt Vonnegut, held as a POW near Dresden, consisted largely of hospitals and cigarette and clarinet factories. Harris gave the city and its civilians an all-out scourging with 1,400 bombers carrying high explosives and incendiaries. The following day, 1,350 USAAF heavy bombers attacked the marshaling yards with high explosives. USAAF tactical fighters flew over in daylight and strafed survivors who had sought refuge along the river banks. Estimates of the dead vary from 35,000 to 135,000. > > Hastings claims that the impetus for the Dresden raid came from Churchill who had a February meeting scheduled with Stalin and Roosevelt at Yalta. He was anxious to show the Soviet leader that the Allies had been supporting Soviet land offensives for years. The “former naval person,” as Churchill called himself, wanted to know what plans Bomber Command had for “basting” the retreating Germans. Stalin, of course, knew all about Allied support. A better reason for the Dresden bombing is needed. RAF briefing notes suggest one: among the objectives was to show “the Russians when they arrive, what Bomber Command can do.” > > Hastings claims that “area bombing was a three- year period of deceit practiced upon the British public and on world opinion”; the areas most heavily bombed were “either city centers or densely populated residential areas which rarely contained any industry.” Nothing comparable to the firestorms of Hamburg and Dresden occurred in Britain, according to Harris’ Bomber Offensive; Germany built “no strategic bombers at all,” he says. The Luftwaffe built 1,000 two-engined bombers which they used for attacks on cities only when they were “not required to support the German army.” At the height of the air war in 1944, Germany produced only 172 strategic bombers compared to the Allies’ total of 7,283. Luftwaffe raids on Guernica, Barcelona, Warsaw, and Rotterdam usually supported land operations. German strategic bombing began and ended with V-2 rocket attacks in 1944 and 1945; the V-2 was designed to avenge Allied bombings, but pathetically inadequate to the task. > > In the aftermath of Dresden, Britain began to rethink area bombing. Military and politicians realized that history might judge it with somewhat less enthusiasm than had RAF Target Intelligence analysts. The “estimated” 135,000 who died in Dresden amounted to “more than double the number of civilians killed in Britain by German air action in all six years of the war.” Not even Churchill was immune from misgivings: “the destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing,” he wrote in a critical 1945 memorandum to Air Staff that, under pressure, he subsequently withdrew. Churchill declined to award a peerage to Harris after the war, although he gave them to many lesser generals and officials. The RAF had no more work for him, and in 1945 he moved back to South Africa. Allan Forbes is a retired anthropologist who was a research associate at Brown University, and was also the National Director and Vice President of the [Council for a Livable World](http://www.clw.org) from 1962-76. The CLW is an organization that works for the limitation of weapons of mass destruction. Does it seem any more believable now? ---
**Author:** ![Kyberneticist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/dc4da7/32.png) [@Kyberneticist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kyberneticist)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2000, 4:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wass-the-uss-cole-a-valid-target/37090/27 "2000-10-18T16:24:15Z")
Oh, I never doubted the veracity! I merely posted the correction to note that while what he said matched with other sources, he was in fact a racist freak. That being said, have the U.S. and U.K. ever issued a formal apology for the bombing of Dresden? ---
**Author:** ![Fillet](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/2acd7d/32.png) [@Fillet](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fillet)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2000, 5:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wass-the-uss-cole-a-valid-target/37090/28 "2000-10-18T17:50:39Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Kyberneticist \* > **Oh, I never doubted the veracity! > I merely posted the correction to note that while what he said matched with other sources, he was in fact a racist freak.** Point taken, and I agree wholeheartedly with your character assessment of that loon. 🙂 > [@](#): > > \*\*That being said, have the U.S. and U.K. ever issued a formal apology for the bombing of Dresden? > \*\* From my admittedly limited reading on this topic, I don’t think so. Anyone else know for sure? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wass-the-uss-cole-a-valid-target/37090.md?page=1)