Are Americans Capable of Forgiveness without Vengence?

Then pay for his medical care, give him a job, and then allow him to sell his wares back to you for a massive profit.

Both Germany and Japan can attest to that....

DD

 

I'm not sure forgiveness is the correct word. Forgiveness and reconciliation apply to areas where the fighting is localized. In Northern Ireland, parties had to "forgive" the IRA and reconcile in order to form a functioning government. In Afghanistan, like it or not, in order for there to be peace the Taliban have to be brought into the election system and that means forgiving them for their violence in exchange for being peaceful in the future and proper participation in government.

As for us, while we haven't had any direct interaction, we've definitely shown our inability to forgive recently. For example, take Iran. I think any president who even suggests setting up diplomatic relations would get burned at the stake yet doing so would dramatically increase our negotiating credibility and influence over Iran. Look at the Middle Eastern countries that actually have influence over Israel. They all have diplomatic relations (Egypt, Turkey and Jordan) We still have sanctions on Cuba for god's sake and list them as a state sponsor of terrorism for things they did half a century ago.

We refused to reconcile with the Baath party government and army simply out of anger at Saddam Hussein and we didn't reconcile with many of the tribal groups that attacked us until General Petraeus forced the issue.

Personally I find that we're just really emotional and it gets in the way of common sense. For example, if India had our attitude, the world might have dealt with a nuclear war by now. India has repeatedly been hit with Pakistani linked terrorist attacks over the last several years in different cities. Thankfully they brush it aside and move on. (and unlike this country, successfully protested the Indian equivalent to the Patriot Act and got most of it repealed a couple of years ago)

 

I'm not a historian, but I'm felt the US wasn't anywhere near that generous. Perhaps someone more familiar with post-war rebuilding can chime in.

Regardless, we do generally prefer to beat the other guy within an inch of his life first.

 

That sort of thinking is dangerously outdated in 21st century asymmetric warfare à la Islamic extremism. You can't win by a whack-a-mole strategy, especially when it costs so much in spite of shifting to "surgical strikes". And even if we were 'winning' against AQ, there isn't one key organization to make the rest of the house of cards tumble.

An estimated $4 trillion spent, an additional $5.3 billion remaining for other expenses, 6k+ US troops killed, ~125k+ civilians killed... after 10 years one would hope voters would objectively evaluate the material and human costs.

Without a thorough ME-region diplomatic and humanitarian undertaking (combined with drone warfare), we won't see real changes.

Sources:
http://costsofwar.org/
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf

 

The debate over Hiroshima and Nagasaki still continues. Based on what I have studied on the subject, I disagree with the above. The fact that most Americans subscribe to your popular explanation gives validity to the saying that history is written by the winners.

A really good movie that explores both sides is Hiroshima (1995). It along with several books hints that the real reasons lay with a hawkish military-industrial complex obsessed with sending Stalin a clear message in addition to a stubborn but proud Japanese nation whose cultural anxieties were ignored at the expense of the enormous money spent on the Manhattan Project. But, as the decades roll by, people forget. What actually happened is as good as anybody's guess.

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Some quotes from various US military figures:

"In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

"General MacArthur's views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed. When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor."

Norman Cousins, a consultant to General MacArthur during the American occupation of Japan

"I felt that it was an unnecessary loss of civilian life... We had them beaten. They hadn't enough food, they couldn't do anything. " - Admiral Nimitz

 

I am referring to the Japanese Empire. It is a proper noun. So it gets a capital. It's called grammar.

Besides, I'm an American citizen. Though heck, I wish there were more crazy right-wingers, or left-wingers or whatever if they would actually make the Japanese give a crap about politics - Americans are highly invested in the political process by comparison.

And we don't, dammit. Or at least, my generation doesn't. Once the old generation, the ones who were born right after the war, dies out, you'll see that Japan actually understands what happened 70 years ago was a bad thing. Not that the Chinese won't keep using it to keep their people busy, but whatever.

You know....... that is more or less my justification for the bomb, and I don't have a problem with it.

Debating over how many lives could or couldn't have been saved is pointless. It's counterfactual history, something which I attempt to avoid no matter what.

My perspective is this. If we had the bomb, we would use the bomb. Someday, somewhere. To me, that's absolutely certain. Humans are stupid. Without a real demonstration, and with a much bigger emphasis on the real than the demonstration apart, they would have rationalized that the bomb wasn't that bad or something - just like Stalin did when he didn't have the bombs and the Americans did, and then used it.

Only by demonstrating how terrible a nuclear weapon is can the real terror of nuclear weapons bring fear into the hearts of people, and thus keep the peace and really cause politicians to make absolutely sure before they use it. So if you're going to use a bomb, on a city of live people, Hiroshima, at the very end of a war, is the best possible scenario to do it.

Yeah, it's hugely cynical. But that's war, and that's foreign policy.

 

I agree that dropping the bombs to send a message to Stalin was also a major reason for it along with sending a message to a stubborn Japan (particularly the second bomb.) That said though the US was clearly tiring of the war and its questionable whether there was enough morale among a US population to continue to support it especially when the invasion of Okinawa showed how bloody a war on the Japanese home Islands might have been. While there is a lot of debate regarding where Japan was at the time the truth is that Japan hadn't surrendered, and to my knowledge made no overtures of surrender, after it was clear they were beaten even after devastating fire bombings practically as bad as A-bombs and even after the Hiroshima bomb. Given the circumstances of World War II it was pretty clear that the US would settle for nothing short of total victory in Japan.

There were a lot of reason for the use of the A-Bombs including the ones you cite but that doesn't dismiss that from Truman's point of view ending the war quickly wasn't a major one.