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Derrick Crowe is the Afghanistan blog fellow for Brave New Foundation / The Seminal. The views expressed are his own. Sign our CREDO petition to reject escalation in Afghanistan & join Brave New Foundation’s #NoWar candlelight vigil on Facebook and Twitter. But make these your first steps as an activist to end this war, not your last.
Once again, the United States is rattling a saber about killing people in Quetta, despite all the inevitable civilian death and mass outrage. Such a move would show the shallowness of the "just war" talk in President Obama’s disgraceful Nobel paean to Mars. Quetta is a city of 850,000 people, which is somewhere between the size of Detroit, Michigan and San Francisco, California. Imagine targeting a person or group with a drone-borne, 500-lbs., roughly 125,600-square-foot-effective-kill-area [pi x (effective kill radius of 200 ft., squared)] bomb in San Francisco’s Union Square, and you get some idea of the civilian death and injury we’re talking about. (Actually, this kill area is larger than Union Square…)
And if you think that the U.S. would never use a drone to drop that kind of weapon on a mass of noncombatants that might also contain Taliban heavies, you’d be wrong.
According to Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann, between 35-40 percent of those killed by drone strikes are civilians, and that’s a middle-of-the-road estimate. David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum estimated that as many as 50 civilians die for every two militants. The drones have been used in such an indiscriminate way that British legal expert Lord Bingham, a senior law lord, said:
the aircraft could follow other weapons considered "so cruel as to be beyond the pale of human tolerance" in being consigned to the history books. He likened drones, which have killed hundreds of civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Gaza, to cluster bombs and landmines.
Rather than furthering the U.S. cause in the “war on terror,” the [remotely piloted vehicle] RPV program, which President Obama seeks to expand in the Af-Pak theater, in reality represents a force-enhancement tool for the Taliban. Its indiscriminate application of death and destruction serves as a recruitment vehicle, with scores of new jihadists rising up to replace each individual who might have been killed by a missile attack. Like the surge that it is designed to complement, the expanded RPV program plays into the hands of those whom America is ostensibly targeting. While the U.S. military, aided by a fawning press, may seek to disguise the reality of the RPV program through catchy slogans such as “warheads through foreheads,” in reality it is murder by another name.
If the U.S. pushes ahead with the idea of targeting suspected militants in Quetta, we can put this idea of "just war" to bed. Or, in any of the inevitable civilian graves.
Cross-posted from Return Good for Evil.
72 Comments
What Obama meant was, it’s just war.
In other words, garden variety killing and maiming.
Nothing to get exercised about, in his opinion.
Until nations recognize protection of noncombatants as the paramount ethic — even at the predictable expense of their own soldiers — the insanity will persist.
You don’t bomb terrorists out of existence; you bomb them into existence.
Did anyone take notice of Obama’s body language during the award ceremony? He doesn’t look at the camera anymore, and it seems as if he’s avoiding it. He keeps his head turned and his chin up with frown on his face, and he walks like his feet weigh 20 lbs each.
To me it says he knows full well he’s turing out warmongering bullshit, and that we don’t believe it.
I had a Deja vu moment reading the danger room on Wired.com: McCrystal ‘s lying again. He’s blaming the Taliban for deaths caused from American weapons, also shooting civilians themselves and blaming it on the US. He’s also accusing the Taliban of strategically placing civilians to cause higher casualty from cluster type flechette bombs for PR, and exaggerating the death count.
We need the public to be exposed to vile and bloody pictures from the front.
Thanks, Derrick. Having stayed once in a nice hotel on Union Square, that example really drives home the madness for me.
In case you haven’t seen it yet, this analysis of why attacks always seem to kill “30 militants” will make you even madder about what is happening with drones.
Obama’s Nobel speech used the language of Just War Theory to cloak absolute War Theory. No surprises for me about this latest round of drone strikes. His speech was beyond shallow. It was a slap in the face on the entire history of peacemaking. He didn’t even try moderate pacifism language (thankfully).
Would like to see the defense and language for “proportionality” regarding Afghanistan and drones.
Since 2006, 81 drone attacks have killed between 750 and 1,000 people.
That doesn’t exactly add up to “exactly 30″ each time.
Mac:
What Jim is referring to is a very interesting report on the number of times U.S. characterizations of the body count of militants turns out to be simply 30. Check out his link…it does make you think. It’s not necessarily just referring to drone strikes or to every drone strike.
Thanks Derrick.
BTW, why the heck would you, in your example, figure that a drone would be dropping a 500lb bomb in a city?
That seems rather far-fetched. A 25lb rocket would be likely, should the talk of bombing in a city turn out to be any more than a threat designed to spur Pakistan’s government into taking care of the militants in Quetta.
We drop 500 lbs and larger bombs in cities. I’m not sure why you would ask that question.
Samarra – 345,00 people.
Amiriyah shelter, 2 one-ton bombs, Baghdad.
I could keep going.
There are certainly a range of options on a Predator or a Reaper. I think, though, we have to look at past experience as an indicator.
You may be right that this is saber rattling to get them in line, but I think the last decade is a good tutor in the lesson that when the U.S. threatens to bomb something, it’s wise to take the U.S. seriously.
And we dropped a-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Derrick. That, and your example, doesn’t apply to this situation.
Also, if you need video, here’s a 500 lbs. bomb being dropped in Sadr city.
http://www.theospark.net/2008/06/500-pound-bomb-jdam-dropped-on-ied.html
Note the dense concentration of buildings in the area.
I think you’re going to have to justify that a bit more, macaquerman. You’re trying to argue that we won’t use those weapons in a city. I’ve shown you that we have used those sizes of weapons in cities in the past, and that those size weapons are equipped on the drones, and that we’ve dropped those size weapons on civilian groups before. You’re going to have to do better than the Hiroshima/Nagasaki red herring to deflect.
Now, if we were arming the drones with a-bombs and flying them over Quetta in the 1940s and threatening to bomb Quetta with drones, we’d have an analogy.
I’m not arguing that we don’t drop bombs on cities.
I’m arguing that you’re the one waving rouge seafood.
You’re the one dropping the hypothetical 500lb bomb. You justify why we would choose the largest possible amount of destruction, and an unusual armament for a drone strike, in the unlikeliest of environment.
Show an example of a 500lb bomb from a drone into a city of a country where we don’t have an army.
I like “waving rogue seafood” and am stealing that in the future, I just want you to know. :P
I don’t buy your constraints at all. I don’t think you’re being realistic. Explain, for example, why the fact that it’s fired from a drone rather than, say, a carrier or a bomber, makes it less likely, or why lacking American personnel near it that could be injured in the blast makes it less likely that it would be dropped. We’ve dropped those bombs from drones in Pakistan where we knew large numbers of noncombatants were present for the purpose of getting the suspected militants in their midst. As far as I’m concerned, that settles it re: whether we’re talking about the plausibility of such an attack.
Here’s my unfair demand of you to answer your unfair demand: show me some directive barring the use of the 500 lbs. bomb in a city where we don’t have troops, or show me some evidence, when the time comes (which hopefully it never does), that the drones flying over Quetta don’t have 500 pound bombs strapped to them, and I’ll be happy to concede the point.
But for the record, I hope what actually happens is more in line with your assertions than mine.
One more thought:
Whether you agree that the most plausible armament is the 500-pounder, the larger issue is that we’ll be firing into a major Pakistani city at all with things that go boom. It is absolutely not plausible to do that and not kill noncombatants. Further, Robert Dreyfuss, who is more hawkish than me on the drone issue, makes a good point today at The Nation that attacking Quetta is a fundamentally different political action than shooting at Pakistani Taliban (as opposed to what McChrystal was calling “Afghan Taliban in the Quetta Shura”…yes, it’s confusing to call people hiding in Pakistan the Afghan anything). It’s in effect an act of war against the Pakistani military.
This is crazy, any way you cut it.
Derrick, it ain’t crazy until it’s done. Did you actually read the LATimes story?
Is there anything about these wars you don’t like?
I very much agree with you about these predator drone strikes being totally immoral.
I was struck by Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann assertion that “between 35-40 percent of those killed by drone strikes are civilians.”
I’ve written about this topic just over a week ago in The Predator War in Pakistan (Dec 4, 2009).
In that post, I present the very different view from Scott Shane at New York Times, in the article “C.I.A. to Expand Use of Drones in Pakistan.”
Shane reported that “residents of the tribal areas where the attacks actually occur, who bitterly resent the militants’ brutal rule, are far less critical of the drones.”
And he wrote this: “The tribal leaders [said] that the strikes were eliminating dangerous militants while causing few civilian deaths.”
I’m not disagreeing with you.
Obama’s decision to launch increasing numbers of unmanned aerial predator drone strikes is a means to an end that is immoral and unacceptable, but I think that the reporting on the numbers of civilian casualties has been very inconsistent.
If our heroic drones cannot deliver a 500 lb pound bomb today then they will tomorrow! We have America’s best and brightest minds working out the engineering schematics as we debate…no expense will be limited. Not just machine but more, a machine controlled by humans on the other side of the planet: more than human — a supermachine. All hail the conquering drones and make sure the eggnog is stiff with 180 proof. It’s not just the cities that will be obliterated.
But, here is the question for you: Are drones (heroic, expensive drones) better to use then real soldiers?
Obama knows.
Have you seen the Lawrence Wilkerson interview with RealNews? Done the day after Obama announced his “new” strategy in Afghanistan.
I pretty much like any form of horrific,senseless,and needless violence.
But I like some wars more than others.
I prefer drone strikes using real little bombs to drone bombings using big ones.
I also prefer threatening to use drones in order to get the Pakistanis to arrest militants to invading Pakistan.
I haven’t. Taking a look now. Thank you!
Thank you for picking up on this story; I’d just now seen it elsewhere.
It sounds like a child’s version of game theory to me.
I fully believe what we’re doing in Iraq and Afghanistan to be wrong, but I think a distinction needs to be made here.
Within the combat theater, as in the Vietnam debacle, we are not fighting a uniformed enemy on a battle front. We are fighting the very citizenry that we are trying to “liberate” (substitue “steal oil from” if you’d like.). I think these drones are wrong, I think civilian death should be abhored and avoided at all costs, but doesn’t some responsibilty fall on the insurgents themselves for hiding among civilians and acting only in ambush?
Without a clear target we should not engage. That’s the way I feel. But if we’re to fight a war against an undefined enemy, innocent people are going to get hurt.
Again I’ll say that we shouldn’t be there in the first place, but now that we are and the insurgency wants us out, the should really come out and fight. These guerilla tactics are endangering their people, not ours.
In 1985 in a badly misbegotten attempt to round up members of the MOVE Organization in Philadelphia,* police dropped an incendiary made up of several pounds of plastick onto one house in a densely-built urban block of typical east coast rowhouses. The ensuing nightmare included the destruction by fire of the entire block in short order. There is a 2005 synopsis of the episode here at NPR; please note the aerial photo of the damage on that page.
Several other media stories, mostly retrospectives from recent years, are in the refs at this wiki article on MOVE.
—-
* Actually, don’t even get me started on what the motivation might have been, though maybe it’s not that far offtopic. Sometimes it’s all you can do to play it straight.
BREAK UP THE HEALTH BILL!!!
Put all of the reforms minus the public option and the Medicare buy-in into one bill and then pass it with 60 votes. Then do another health bill with the PUBLIC OPTION and pass it using reconciliation!!!
I’m not sure what part of the interview you wanted me to see.
I was struck by this part from Wilkerson at the end:
I agree. I don’t think that Obama has been captured by the military industrial complex, either.
The interview seemed to be more about much larger issues in SW and South Asia (what Wilkerson calls West and Central Asia) than about the use of predator drones in Pakistan.
On the larger issues, I think we should give Obama a chance to create the conditions that will allow him to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.
On the use of predator drones, whether against a country with which we are at war or into a country with which we are not at war, Obama really needs to see the immorality of it.
As I pointed out in the post I refer to @ 18:
The problem, in part, seems to me that Obama is pushing wide open a door that will lead to even more serious abuses of predator drones in the future.
i didnt know detroit and michigan are in california. sorry i actually read it that way in moment of near complete blog overload/apathy. i have to go now.
Sorry, I’m thinking with my military hat on. Use of drones is a tactical decision, military and civilian, as a part of achieving an overall goal, the stabilization of the region. Wilkerson gives an overall anaysis of the situation. Drones are players/tools in the military aspect.
War stinks, however let’s learn a few facts: drones are neither unmanned nor indiscriminate. They are manned remotely by humans operating on the best available and most up-to-date target information. Far from being a blunt force delivery system they use small, precisely targeted munitions designed for minimal collateral damage, ie dead people. The US military generally is the best trained and most conservative in the use of force than any military that has ever existed, period. If you want to have an intelligent discussion on war policy, you need to have real-world information on tactics and weapons systems. I hope this was helpful. Now, continue foaming at the mouth.
Um, what? What good would that do? Lining up on a battlefield getting completely decimated by an occupying force that’s a century and a half more technologically advanced, has a huge capacity for war production, and in a pinch can just drop nukes on you.
They’re engaging in asymmetric warfare, because that’s all they’ve got. Anything else would be suicide for its own sake.
If Obama were truly a principled and honorable man he would have refused the Nobel Peace prize. He’s not an FDR, an MLK, a Malcom X, a Medgar Evers, a Paul Wellstone. He’s nothing more than a POLITICIAN.
Uh, I called that one a year ago while most here were on some kinda acid.
Obama can invite the Israeli IDF to show him how to get the most bang [and the most charred and mangled collaterally damaged corpses] for his military industrial complex buck. Israel managed to slaughter over 400 kids in Gaza while, uh, studiously avoiding the killing of innocent civilians.
Can America top that in Quette.
Who makes these predator drones?
General Atomics does.
From the New York Observer:
Homeland security apparently runs in Republican Congressman Peter King’s family. King’s son, Sean, started working at former U.S. Senator Alfonse D’Amato’s Park Strategies lobbying firm in February. The firm represents several clients with multi-billion dollar Homeland Security contracts, such as General Atomics and Lockheed Martin. They have also made campaign contributions to Congressman King.
george:
But of course America’s national security is above all that political, war profiteering stuff. It’s all about being patriotic citizens of course.
And no one is more patriotic than the commander in chief.
Or to paraphrase Bill Shakespeare:
Doctor:
What is it he does now? Look how he rubs his hands.
Gentlewoman:
It is an accustom’d action with him, to seem thus
washing his hands. I have known him continue in this a quarter of
an hour.
Gentleman Obama:
Yet here’s a spot.
Doctor:
Hark, he speaks. I will set down what comes from him, to
satisfy my remembrance the more strongly.
Gentleman Obama:
Out, damn’d spot! out, I say!—One; two: why, then
’tis time to do’t.—Hell is murky.—Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and
afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our
pow’r to accompt?—Yet who would have thought the children of Quette would
have had so much blood in them?
Obama can invite the Israeli IDF to show him how to get the most bang [and the most charred and mangled collaterally damaged corpses] for his military industrial complex buck. Israel managed to slaughter over 400 kids in Gaza while, uh, studiously avoiding the killing of innocent civilians.
Can America top that in Quette?
Who makes these predator drones?
General Atomics does.
From the New York Observer:
Homeland security apparently runs in Republican Congressman Peter King’s family. King’s son, Sean, started working at former U.S. Senator Alfonse D’Amato’s Park Strategies lobbying firm in February. The firm represents several clients with multi-billion dollar Homeland Security contracts, such as General Atomics and Lockheed Martin. They have also made campaign contributions to Congressman King.
george:
But of course America’s national security is above all that political, war profiteering stuff. It’s all about being patriotic citizens of course.
And no one is more patriotic than the commander in chief.
Or to paraphrase Bill Shakespeare:
Doctor:
What is it he does now? Look how he rubs his hands.
Gentlewoman:
It is an accustom’d action with him, to seem thus
washing his hands. I have known him continue in this a quarter of
an hour.
Gentleman Obama:
Yet here’s a spot.
Doctor:
Hark, he speaks. I will set down what comes from him, to
satisfy my remembrance the more strongly.
Gentleman Obama:
Out, damn’d spot! out, I say!—One; two: why, then
’tis time to do’t.—Hell is murky.—Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and
afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our
pow’r to accompt?—Yet who would have thought the children of Quette would
have had so much blood in them?
How I wish that were true. But the facts, including some presented here belie that. Our history of callous disregard for civillians goes back to at least WWII. even before the gratuitous use of the nuclear bombs. Civilian losses in Iraq are a disgrace.
You can count on it. If we have the weapons we will use them. If there are drones equipped with 500# bombs many civilians will die.
In other words, “What we’re doing is justified, because at least we’re not carpet bombing them.” ???
No, please read my posting again. Did you miss the word “generally?” Do you think US troops and their commanders are bloodthirsty baby-killers? Are they the worst in history? No, they are not. I reject your statement that we have ever had callous disregard for civilian casualities. That is, if not an outright lie, hugely misinformed because you state it as if it were policy. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were not gratuitous. They stopped the war flat and saved the life of my father and millions of US/allied troops as well as untold millions of Japanese civilians. A war that we did not start, BTW. We have had thousands of missles in hardened silos for about 60 years, without a single launch. That is restraint. I agree that the wars in Iraq and Afganistan are wrong, but I praise the US military and their restrained use of force. On the big picture, if it were up to me I would recall every US soldier/sailor on the planet back to US soil.
Actually, I did not say anything to justify any current military use of force. Try to read the words without injecting your interpretation or “in other words.” That is a way of putting words in my mouth. I am a very plain-spoken guy. I write what I mean, even if my spelling is faulty.
Yeah, when are we going to get a monument for Grenada?
Of course I read it. I’ve also read some really encouraging Newsweek stories that say that Obama is the one resisting the people in his administration who want to go to crazy town, which is good reason to hope. However, I would say, given that we have “senior administration officials” now talking to the Times giving their suggestions a top line billing, I seem to remember a game like this playing out recently and the leakers getting pretty much exactly what they wanted. So whether these are perfectly analogous situations, that’s a good lesson in how important it is to come out early and hard against these kind of trial balloons.
Our endless imperial hostile military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq are evil. President Obama’s escalations in Afghanistan are creating more evil.
Huh? Irrelevant.
That’s an interesting interpretation of the events surrounding Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One that ignores:
- the fact that the Japanese civilian leadership were already pressing for surrender.
- the emperor wouldn’t previously surrender, because he didn’t want to agree to an end to the imperial lineage; a condition we capitulated on after the fact.
- the death toll estimates were based on the Japanese waging total war, an exceedingly spurious assertion.
- we were preparing and willing to continue to drop nuclear bombs until they surrendered, or until we wiped out every last one of them, which ever came first.
Maybe you have a better understanding of the people and forces behind the various leaks, but this one about Quetta seems to be Obama-sponsored and aimed at influencing Pakistan.
Do you have a real problem with attempting to pressure Pakistan to clean out these guys and close their training camps?
there is something wrong with a species that drops remote controlled bombs on its fellows.
The Japanese weren’t going to unconditionally surrender and they sure as hell were going to resist an invasion. There’s nothing spurious about claiming that they would. They were passing out wooden spears to the civilians and caching arms throughout the country.
We could have avoiding dropping those bombs by invading and killing Japanese with other weapons and taking casualties ourselves, but we preferred not to do so.
Either way, there were going to be a lot more dead people added to the already monstrous total.
Wrong, again, Nathan, at least in part. Do you think we had an unlimited supply of nuclear weapons to deploy at the time? Let’s zoom back to the original question: are Americans bloodthirsty people who wish to dominate the world and bring all it’s peoples to it’s control? An examination of history says “no.” We have not occupied and politically controlled on a permanent basis a single country since prior to WWI which is as far back as I can realistically discuss. If you just hate America, then please say so. I don’t, and I believe the country tries to do it’s best for good in theworld in the majority of it’s national campaigns. We are not perfect, but we are not the devil. Who do you think is the No 1 good guy on the world stage with a comperable population? Sorry if I discount tiny population countries like, say, Finland or Sweden. What’s your choice? China? North Korea? Russia? Iran?
Thank you, macaquerman!
Not really. The same kind of misguided logic that led us into ‘pacifying’ the hospitals of Grenada from Cuban commies who hated America is the same trump card pulled over and over again by American militarists. As they now do in the resource wars of IraqAfgahanPakistan, and soon Iran, and Bolivia, etc. Now we use drones instead of B-52s and Stealth bombers, or MIRVs, or napalm, or gattling guns.
The Pentagon, in service to pavlovian American militarists, will always come through, for the pavlovian conditions they have created in their militarists. And screw everyone else. The cost, like collateral damage, is anything but irrelevant. It is, in fact, destroying not only our democracy, but our slim chances for international cooperation, survival, and recognition of the value of non-American lives. So I reject your patriotism. That is really irrelevant, although costly.
By all means we need a monument to this. It is a great enterprise. Let the pigeons of the future have a field day on it while the emaciated survivors gaze on it and wonder what the hell it all meant.
They were willing to surrender on all conditions except ending the imperial lineage, prior to our dropping the first bomb. After two bombs, they agreed to even that condition. After they surrendered we allowed them to keep the imperial lineage intact, because using the emperor as a political figurehead to sell reconstruction to the populace was seen as advantageous.
Was the dropping of two nuclear weapons, and the associated loss of life and material, worth getting nothing for it?
I am an American, not a militarist. I think intervening in other countries is generally a mistake. So we have more in common that you may imagine. I see you would like to put me in a box labeled “right-wing extremist.” That would not be accurate. You, sir, are anxious to hate.
We did get something for it, Nathan.
We got unconditional surrender. You, and even I, might find that to be worth less than the price that the Japanese paid for holding out, but that was their choice, not ours.
Long before the surrender of Germany, the US, Great Britain, and the USSR formally agreed that they would fight until Germany and Japan surrendered unconditionally.
But Grenada was victory! Aren’t you content yet? What will it take?
Japan was running out of oil. No oil. No zeroes. No tanks. No battleships. They had about six months supply of oil going into the fall and winter months (according to Paul Minear, in Victors Justice.)
Hiroshima was a war crime. Nagasaki was just pure viciousness, beyond the pale.
Oops, I meant Richard Minear.
I have no idea what your point is and, I suspect, neither do you. I am opposed to American intervention in other countries unless our country’s survival depends on it. Yes, I am shamelessly, joyfully, pro-American and a capitalist, but I am not an imperialist.
Wow sorry to leave you so confused. With age comes a certain sense of reverie towards life. Perhaps that is my point, not to be too obvious. That, and that all wars border on absurdity. Of course there are other nuances too that should be apparent but perhaps, in time, will become more relevant to you.
If you are a real capitalist then you should be storming the Pentagon and screaming for the shutdown of the war profiteers: Boeing; GE; and General Atomic. They are some of the most corrupt examples of corporate welfare that have led us to this difficult place. Just some advice. Take care and keep thinking.
Yes, there were about out of everything except small arms and the determination to die in defense of the Emperor and the Home Islands.
The invasion would have killed more Japanese than the bombings did and would have also killed as many as 50,000 Americans.
As to the A-bombs being war crimes, I doubt it.
But even as war crimes, they wouldn’t have made top of the list in that war. The Japanese did more and worse.
Our use of incendiaries in the bombing of Tokyo was worse.
I’m not going to get into a debate on the humanitarian use of nuclear weapons, or a nostalgic review of horrorisms.
But you, and a few hundred other people on planet Earth share a similar opinion.
I’m off to drink Absinthe and watch Star Wars I, the Phantom Menace (and no, I am not being ironic.) Good night and have a very Merry Christmas.
I’m usually astounded and upset to hear that anybody shares my opinions.
Enjoy your refreshment, evening and holidays.
I am for pressure, sure. But that comes with a big, big caveat: when these sorts of things get floated, I don’t think we have the luxury of taking them as anything but deadly serious. So, to reiterate the above, I am flatly opposed to beginning a bombing campaign over Quetta, and if we make good on the threat it should not only put paid to the president’s just war rhetoric (though I believe that to be already done, but w/e), but would be a huge, huge mistake.
Re: the leak dynamic, it’s always a nightmare to try to untangle who leaks what and why. But my thoughts are these: someone leaked it, and someone else told Newsweek that it’s Obama standing in the way. If President Obama did want it leaked, someone else sure pulled the rug out from under him re: making Pakistan think he was serious, and I’m not sure what purpose that would serve. Of course, everyone involved could be talking out their @$$, and that would not surprise me either.
My old man said in prepping for the invasion of Japan they were planning for one million allied casualties. One million, not 50,000. There is plenty of blame to go around for war crimes. War sucks but it continues to be very popular, unfortunatly.
Your old man was listening to the wrong guys.
The real figure was 250,000 casualties with 1/5 KIA to take the main island of Honshu and Tokyo,possibly more casualties if there was organized resistance after the government fell and we had to keep fighting.
The numbers got inflated (a lot) to fend off criticism of dropping the bombs.
Derrick, I’m also flatly opposed to a bombing campaign in Quetta or any other city in Pakistan. I’m opposed to any drone strike in a Pakistani city that uses anything other than a small rocket, and only then if there’s a hell of a good reason.
I’m completely onboard with saying just about anything that gets Pakistan to do the job of capturing, killing, or uprooting the various groups of terrorists within their territory and doing it now.
We really shouldn’t have to have our army in Afghanistan. The Pakistanis should have stepped on this nest instead of feeding it. They have to stomp it before it eats their country away.
No, Sandy, we did not drop the Bombs on Japan to save American lives; we dropped the bombs to end the war and preempt the Russian invasion of Japan as they were committed to do. Was it a good thing? In the long-run, probably so. Where civilian lives are concerned, the firebombings of Japanese cities, never mind Dresden, were all part of winning the war, though the latter was unnecessary. An AQ honcho riding in his car with his wife(ves) and children and is smoked, with them, by a predator drone? If you know you are a possible target, do you really want your wife and children with you? Seems to me, many of the civilian casualties of the predators have much to do with choices the targets have made. And, let us not forget, the many more civilians have been killed by the suicide bombers than predator drones.
We didn’t have an unlimited supply. We were on schedule to produce, and use, nine atomic bombs through October of 1945. Production was expected to increase to 5 per month, up from three, through the end of 1945, and through early 1946.
At what point does that burden and liability shift?
Considering that we were willing, and planning, to literally engage in cleansing mainland Japan of all mammalian life through repeated nuclear attacks; at what point does it become our responsibility as the entity with the power to engage, or not engage, in those nuclear attacks to accept as adequate surrender all articles of disarmament, retreat, etc., but to allow them to keep a thousands years old cultural anachronism; lest we succeed in eradicating them utterly? Which we let them keep anyway.
The Japanese were no more responsible for our dropping two nuclear bombs on them, than the Iraqis were for not capitulating to a pointless ultimatum, and giving us a flimsy pretext to invade. There were a thousand ways for that situation to play out, and we picked the method that we did, based on bullshit propagandizing to the American public about the nature and condition of our enemy. Propagandizing later confirmed to have been known as such by our leadership (I’m talking about Japan, not Iraq).
I appreciate your point about the responsibility, but you’re going a little too far by saying that we were planning to kill all of the Japanese people.
And you’re going a lot too far when you compare this to the Iraqi War. There’s nothing in that comparison and no reason for it.
The whole of Japanese society was unified in waging wars of aggression fought in criminal and barbarous fashion.
And no, we didn’t let them keep their Imperial tradition. We gutted it and used their Emperor for our purposes and to serve as a tool of our governance of Japan.
I am SO stealing that.
You don’t bomb terrorists out of existence; you bomb them into existence.
Edwin Starr:
War!
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothin’.
ART45:
Drones!
What are they good for?
Killin’ brides and kids.
It seems as though this site has been invaded by paid propagandists from both sides. Any who seek to change the deeply held convictions of those of us on the left should know that we are not swayed by propaganda of any stripe, especially that from the DNC.