Achebe says exactly what I want all too often . Damn you Achebe, this bbs isn't large enough for both of us! To articulate a different argument to arrive at the same conclusion: In all seriousness, the argument that their actions justify reciprocal actions on our behalf just legitimizes the method. Basically, you're relying on "we're right, they're wrong" to justify our deeds. That's problematic, because any disagreement is going to face two sides that find a different answer to the question of right. Therefore, your argument justifies anybody in doing whatever they want to do, since "they're right." And they're just "responding" to an attack. You think that bin Laden started the war through terrorists attacks. In turn, they might respond by saying that sanction on Iraq and support of Israel was the provocation. Your response, is that the invasion of Kuwait and the invasion of Israel justify these measures. In return, they could point out the injustice of Western colonialism. See the problem here? It's infinitely regressive. Who's "right" is largely a function of the temporal limits one places on discussion. The answer? Justification should be arrived at through structure, not content. Certain things are just not acceptable. Terrorism, nukes, and biowarfare fall under these categories because of the inevitable civilian casualties.
wait..i think you guys misunderstood me. i'm not saying we intentionally target civilians. I'm saying that we strike with certain force to completely eliminate the facilities where he is or might be developing weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately, I think he's probably surrounded them in civilian areas. Like the way he builds germ warfare labs below hosptials. Or like the way Osama travels amongst women and children, knowing we won't attack him that way. Perhaps we can destroy them with conventional weapons. but we've done that before and he's built them right back up again. Perhaps it's time to end the cycle to secure our freedoms and the lives of our citizens. It would certainly be a maddening decison to have to make, and I'm glad I'm not the one who has to make it! But for the record...when you begin a surprise offensive and target and attack another nation, you shouldn't expect any degree of mercy in retribution. Particularly when all you targeted were civilians. We gave the Japenese ample warning that we had a weapon that they would regret. They took their chances and continued to take American life. We dropped the bomb and ultimately saved countless American lives. We went in, and assisted the Japanese in rebuilding into a great nation and an economic power. Is it regrettable that we killed that many civilians? Absolutely. But no one seemed to have a problem with the more violent fire-bombings over Tokyo. We could have continued the prosecution of the war in that way over Hiroshima and Nagasaki...ultimately it would have ended in even more Japanese and American casualties. We have the luxury of 60 years of hindsight to sit in moral judgment on those who defended our liberties to speak of it. Achebe - actually Romans Chapter 13 is something you might find helpful in understanding. Paul has just come out of talking about how we are to befriend our enemies and pray for them in Ch. 12...but then he turns to a broader, national scale. "But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he (govt) does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God's servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer." I ultimately think free will leads to this kind of awful scenario where innocents are killed..and I think that makes God pretty sad. But God never says for us to not defend ourselves when attacked...particularly the way we were on 9/11.
I don't necessarily disagree with you MadMax... (though I believe our upbringings concerning Japan may have been revisionist)... I just consider this entire thing, perhaps a clash of cultures. I am more intrigued by the fact that I can give legitimacey to the terrorists than I am what happens now in the aftermath. I want security... for my grandmother, my mother, my wife... and my friends and myself. Secondary to that, I want the world to be a nice place for everyone on the planet. That's perhaps callous, but what are you going to do. BTW, thanks for the Romans citation.
Achebe -- no problem... i would agree...i would even go so far as to say that your first RESPONSIBILITY is towards the security of your grandmom, mom and wife. Ultimately, that mindset works best for everyone all over the world, I think. Sort of like a social Adam Smith philosophy.
It was actually economists who quantified much of this in evolutionary ecology. I'm just cracking the surface of the field... but it's truly interesting stuff.
It seems like every thread somehow becomes religious now. Hmmm... Homer: Aw, this isn't going to be about Jesus, is it? Rev. Lovejoy: All things are about Jesus, Homer.
I wish I knew more about the full realm of economics as well as the history of Adam Smith. Unfortunately, we barely touched his stuff in continental philosophy, and my other western philosophy classes my 'first go around' through school. I wish I knew more about him than the superficial "father of capitalism" sort of thing. I wouldn't doubt that he had a ton of influence on some of the evolutionary biologists/economists that I've been exposed to of late... Hamilton, John Maynard Smith, etc. Perhaps the more I delve into this, the more I'll find out that Adam Smith is one of the distant fathers of evolutionary ecology... the way in which Malthus influenced Darwin, for example.
Reminds me of one of the original episodes... Homer: Save me Jeebus! Oh god! Island natives: Oh god oh god oh god oh god (all while doing some convulsion "dance" on the ground)
Homer: Oh, God, why did this happen? Marge: That's not God, Homer. That's a waffle Bart threw up there and stuck to the ceiling. Homer: (takes down waffle) I know I should not eat thee. (eats waffle) Mmmmm...sacrelicious. or... When Bart had the tank, he pointed it at the church briefly and... Rev. Lovejoy: Not the church! Jesus lives there! All classics.
Lack of foresight my ass. You're talking about another MILLION casualties on the US side alone if we invade Japan, which was the next step. Dropping the bomb saved, in the end, both American and Japanese lives. Truman clearly used this as his calculus. And if it WAS a statement to the USSR, so be it. Deterrence kept the world from going poof for the forty plus years of the Cold War. And the sheer magnitude of its power had kept other from subsequently using it (although in pure killing power it caused no more casualties than many of the bombing campaigns throughout the war). Re: Churchill. Very interesting considering how much the UK had to do with rolling up the Japanese in the Pacific. Also consider Churchill himself regretted allowing the firebombing of Dresden and so had his own /guilt bias. In fact he may have regretted not being in a position to decide whether Truman would order the bomb dropped, as he might have been if his lacky Roosevelt has still been alive. Re: Monty/Leahy/Eisenhower - any chance these old dog soldiers didn't want to be replaced by technology? Leahy's 'i was not taught to make war on women and children' line is especially funny since every other city in Germany and Japan had been reduced to rubble. Re: Bushido and the Emperor. The Emperor was not calling the shots through most of the war, the military was. Japan had given no indications they were ready to capitulate. Re: Japanese attempts to surrender. Don't you think they knew the end was near when they lost Iwo Jima and Okinawa and every other major conquest except some of their gains in China? Did they sue for peace? NO. If this has ONE SHRED OF TRUTH then why didn't Japan surrender after the FIRST bomb was dropped? Why did they surrender IMMEDIATELY AFTER the SECOND bomb? They were given a chance to surrender after the first bomb and they refused. The Japanese refused to surrender unconditionally, and so suffered the consequences. As per the argument that the USSR was a motivating factor, I seriously doubt it. They had neither the available assets nor any expertise in amphibious operations (I can't remember who the Soviet expert is in the bbs, but despite his ridiculous Soviet bias maybe he can give us some insight on this one). Blaming the US for Japan's militancy is...well...horse****. Were we competitors for resources and influence? Defintely. Did we try to force Japan's hand with sanctions on raw materials? Yes. Did we force Japan to invade Manchuria, China, the Philippeans, French Indo-China, Burma, New Guinea, the Solomons, the Marshalls, Wake Island, and all the others? COME ON. It seems in each of these threads the US is coming off as the CAUSE of all the world's problems since the beginning of freaking time. And personally I find THAT really disturbing. I wonder if any of these critics are aware of the good things the US has done. It is certainly useful to see things from both sides, but a lot of you just seem to see the OTHER side, which is just as skewed a view as you claim American centrics have. Re: Shanna's unite Islam argument. It may be that a war with Islam is coming anyway. Is there a place for Islam in the world? No doubt. Is there a place for a militant Islam? Simply put, no. Is there a place for 'moderate' Muslims who live in secular societies but support militant Islam? No. They've got to get off the fence. What level of force we use shouldn't matter in their decision. If the Koran forbids attacking non-combatants then they shouldn't ever support Bin Laden or his ilk. NO MATTER WHAT THE US DOES. They may choose NOT to support the US, but if they diregard their own interpretations of the Koran because of what the US does, then I think they are part of the problem, not the solution. I DO agree that the nuclear line is DEFINITELY one that should be crossed only with great contemplation and dire need.
HayesStreet... I think that we started this discussion before about the necessity of using the A-bombs. Here's a little bit of info I found about this whole question, if you're interested. Posting the whole thing would be absurd because it is about 5 pages, but here's the link. (and if anyone can tell me why my links don't work, I'd appreciate it... in the meantime, just cut and paste in a new window...) http://www.ncesa.org/html/hiroshima.html I've read several of the sources quoted in this article/book review-- in particular, the Truman diaries, the Brown diary, and a few of the other materials related to Byrnes. From these alone, I find it really difficult to believe that the US administration believed (after mid-summer, 1945) that the A-bombs were necessary to a Japanese surrender. Byrnes, as Truman's Sec. of State, was far more concerned with keeping Russia from gaining strategic advantages after entering the war (i.e.: laying claim to valuable warm-water ports in Manchuria and further south, and similar strategic advantages in Europe) than he was with sparing American lives in an attack on Japan. After Potsdam, both he and Truman knew that the war would end shortly after Russia entered (and without the need for any Kyushu landing)... The often-invoked image of thousands and thousands of Americans dying to end Japanese imperialism (and, yes Japanese imperialism was horrible; I am not defending it) was a rhetorical device to justify the bombings when other alternatives (1. Waiting for the Japanese surrender after the Russian entry; 2. Adjusting the language of unconditional surrender-- for example, "you can keep the Emperor as a figurehead") had been prematurely rejected.
Some general concessions had already been made to Russia during the <i>Yalta</i> meeting in early 1945. Russia would declare war on Japan within a few months of Germany's defeat to occupy Japanese forces in Manchuria and prevent their return to Japan for defensive purposes against an American invasion. Since the war in Europe had ended, the defeat of Japan was inevitable. The atomic bombs zoomed the timetable forward. Japanese deaths from the two bombs were roughly 225,000. What would have been the combined Japanese-US casulties if an invasion had been launched instead? An interesting read on the endgame concerning Korea during WWII: <A HREF="http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/1995/boose.htm">Portentous Sideshow: The Korean Occupation Decision</A> Russian naval forces and actions in WW II? Nothing significant. The ability to coordinate large scale amphibious operations and the equipment needed to accomplish them were not part of Russian actions in WW II. I found reading the Stimson diaries interesting. Mango
That was my whole point... There wouldn't have been any Japanese-US casualties because, according to Truman diaries, as of 7/17/45 ("He'll [Stalin and Russia] be in the Jap War on August 15th. Fini Japs when that comes about."), Truman knew Russia would enter the war and a US invasion was totally unnecessary. The next day, he wrote a letter to his wife... "...I've gotten what I came for - Stalin goes to war [against Japan] August 15 with no strings on it. He wanted a Chinese settlement [in return for entering the Pacific war, China would give Russia some land and other concessions] - and it is practically made - in a better form than I expected. [Chinese Foreign Minister] Soong did better than I asked him. I'll say that we'll end the war a year sooner now, and think of the kids who won't be killed! That is the important thing." If the question of US casualties was still lingering, why would he be saying this in mid-July?
The Potsdam Proclamation of July 26, 1945 was not acted upon by Japan. Why not? <A HREF="http://www.nuclearfiles.org/docs/1945/450726-potsdam.html">Potsdam Proclamation</A> What was the projected timetable for a Japanese surrender after Russia voided the Non-Aggression Pact and declared war on Japan? The answer to that question is something that I will have to search for. I just found another source that listed casulties from the atomic devices at roughly 260,00. Mango
interesting...here's my perspective on it...my grandfather fought at leyte and okinawa...he was on his way to the main island of Japan. that might give you some indication as to how i feel about the topic. having said that...i'll say again...when you sneak attack another nation you have zero room to request mercy from those you attacked. if they sue for peace, we would have had peace. instead they don't...we drop the bomb at Hiroshima and we still don't see the Japanese sue for peace. you're talking about a nation that had been losing lives fighting the japanese for years. long, tough years of war that we can't begin to fathom having just emerged from the fantasyland of the 90's. judging that action with some sort of moral righteousness today really rings upon deaf ears with me. this sort of PR thinking during a war leads to pointless limitations and checks upon your own power, which ultimately ends in either unachieved objectives or pointless casualties.
