A 'few'...ok, I'll go that far, but if I started to list wars resulting from the beaten enemy rising up and turning the tables, I'll be here all night. Let's start where Herodotus did; 1) Persians invade and conquer 'greek' cities along Ionian coast, defeat king of Media, ...'victory'. 2) When Persia is occupied with trouble elsewhere, Greeks from Athens sally over to Ionian Coast to help lead revolt, sack Perisan capital of Sardis, and lead uprising against local Persian imposed government...'victory', albeit short lived. 3) Persians return, retake region, and Xerxes sets about to conquer Greece...as he sees it, to teach them a lesson and end the threat of any more problems in the area, as a result of thei earlier 'victory'...couers much of northern regions, but gets his comeupance at Marathon, a clear greek "Victory." 4) As a result of the embarrassment of grek victory, 10 years later ( approx) Xerxes' son leads huge campaign to conquer Greece...initially very successful, takes Thrace, Macedonia, Thessaly, Boeitia, Attica ( including Athens ) etc., and then s defeated by the Athenians by water and later the Spartans by land...is chased back, and all one time greek lands, including Ionian cities in Asia Minor are retaken by Greeks. Clear greek 'victory'.. 5) Decades later, as a result of past Persian wrongs/victories against the greeks, Phillip and Alexander of Macedon plan and enact the single greatest campign of conquest in history, invade Asia minor, and don't stop with the 'victories' until they reach India...Entire Persian Empire ceases to be...for now. Peace is restored, greek culture spread...excpet. 6) A couple of years later Alexander dies, and his generals, raised on the concept of conquest, first divide up his empire, and then go about warring for a couple of hundred years of continuous strife, killing of each other, constantly engaging in betrayals, and most of all batle ofter bloody battle until the Romans appear...and have their own victories... 7) Of course, this leads to resentment in the area, particularly in the East, where the former remnants of the Persian Empire now become the Parthian Empire, and when their first visitation with a Roman general, Sulla, is percieved as a diplomatic victory, a later general, Crassus decides, in effect, that the truest peace comes after real victory, and invades...and is completely wiped out. At this point you can cue endless warfare in the region for hundreds of years, each side seeking to pay back the other, reclaim lost land, etc...and it goes on and on... History is endless in this regard, giddy. Think about Israel; how many 'victories' have they had? How much true(est) peace has ensued? In general, people don't like to be beaten...WWI has just been the most clearly costly example, but an examination of the effects of the European Wars of Succession will give you endless wars resulting from wars. Bizmark's victories in the rise of Prussia/Germany were followed by, you guessed it, WWI as France and later Britain resented the power of the new state achieved through her victories, especially against France....The Crusades...History is littered with wars resulting from victories, not peace...not for long, anyways.
I never said it was a good thing... just necessary at the time. We had great regrets and apprehensions about doing it didn't we?
How on Earth can you compare the way we treated Japan and the Marshall Plan to the way our European allies treated Germany, AH, and the Turks after WW1? It was the vindictiveness of our WW 1 allies that fueled the hateful rise of Hitler. It was our good will and the Marshall plan that created the wonderfully peaceful and productive country of West Germany after WW 2. Thank God we nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because millions of people would have died if we hadn't taken that extreme measures. American altruism after modern wars makes your historical references irrelevant.
Ok I have to jump in here...peace is created after war when the terms are acceptable enough to both sides and whenever the victor is able to reorient the conquered society to something closer to its values. Also, if the conquered is forced to channel their energy into creating a society not based on beating its neighbors militarily then peace is created. Like after WWI peace could have been sustained if there was a way to remodel Germany in a peaceful way, rather than to punish it to the point that it would look anywhere for answers to its problems. Civil wars are also a good example of this creation of peace. One faction within a nation has to defeat another to decide who is the most powerful. The victor states the terms of how society will be run and then enforces it in a way acceptable enough to loser that future conflicts will not destroy the nation again. I have been up all night so I hope that makes sense somewhat.
Have you read the Japanese perspective on the nuclear attacks at the time? Read the book Embracing Defeat by John Dower and it will give you a better idea of it. Perhaps if we could have nuked Japan sooner then less lives would have been lost in all the bombing runs we did before those nukes.
Am I the only one thinking 'what the F*CK?' in response to this phrase? Seriously? (Oh, and that argument about the 'millions' more who would have died had the bombings not happened is fairly conclusively proven to be wrong. Haven't we argued about this before?) 'I am become death, the destroyer of worlds...' I hope I never become jaded enough to be as blase as some of you are about nuclear warfare - or nuclear *anything*, for that matter. It's not just a common-or-garden weapon...
1) the question wasn't "Compare post WWI with post WWII, it was dealing with a statement that the truest peace comes after victory, not negotiations...so your point is, as usual, missing mine. 2) I don't have the time to get into your as usual Flag waving rendition of the Marshall Plan, and it being about our 'goodwill'. 3) Do you buy everything your country sells you? The statement that the bombs were used to 'save lives' was the rationale at the time, and flawed in many, many ways, some of them admitted. 1) It was based on saving US lives, not Japanese...and before you say that that's a good thing, remember that you, like everyone else in the world, think it would have been a bad thing for Sadaam Hussein to use nuclear arms against us...even if it meant 'saving' his own soldiers lives by doing it...Wrong is wrong. 2) The numbers were based on some projections of what it would take...and many of those have since been seriously called into question. Morerever, there were other estimates at the time which were nowhere near as drastic as the ones Truman used to justify using them. 3) In either case, the numbers were off on the other end...expectations of civilian casualities of a conventional war...even in the reports Truman used have been far and away exceeded by those which happened with the A-Bomb. There may or may not be argument that usung the A-Bomb saved combatent lives...there is absolutely no doubt that it cost many, many more civilian lives. I guess if you want to thank God for that, that's between you and He. 4) Doesn't explain the use of Fat Boy. What does is that they wanted very, very much to show the world whjat they could do...Oppenheimer admitted this much. Hiroshima was a Plutonium 235 self sustaining solid based reaction bomb, or "thin man', and was dropped on August 6th, '45. And the world was stunned, both that we could, and that we would. But three days later, with Japan having made no aggressive military actions of any kind since Thin Man, we dropped another. " Fat boy", a hollow centered imploding plutonium 'crit mass' bomb, of an entriley different construction. Why did we need to drop this one too? Oppenheimer has admitted that there was 'incredib;e pressure' from military/political command to make a demonstration, not to Japan, but to the Russians, etc. just what our capacity was, and that we had more than one kind of bomb, or bomb period. He has also admitted that a sense of vindictivness, re: Pearl Harbor was 'always in the air' at the latter days of the project...after it became clear that it would not be necessary to use the weapon against the Germans. So you have a case where we used weapons we have since said are immoral to use, used them against people who didn't have the ability to defend themselves against it, used with a sense of revenge, caused significantly more civilian casualties than even our most extreme prognastications of a conventional war expected, were used twice for no practical reason aside from demonstration of power, with an additional hundreds of thousands of civilian lives tagged on, and you, jh, thank God that we did because of some rhetoric issued at the time which has since been largely refuted, even by our own experts? I agree that Truman himself may have thought he was making the right decision...but the info he got was prejudiced towards the extreme, and has since been largely proven wrong. But of course, like with everything else, using nuclear arms is just plain wrong and evil..hell, it's a sign of evil that Saddam or Northe Korea want to even have them....but it's ok if we use 'em,cause we're, well, us.
There is definitely something to what you say, but it addresses neither of the two topics of discussion: giddy's contention that the truest peace comes after victory, not negotiation, which is clearly not true, nor the historical evidence that best case post war conditions rarely occur, and that more often victory on one side leads to further war from the other.
Well, if Saddam had had nuclear weapons and launched them at us after we declared war, and wiped out our civilian population, I'm sure we would have been comforted with knowing that it was a tricky decision for him...or is it just plain wrong when other do it/contemplate doing it, even if their military experts are telling them that doing it will save Iraqi lives?
I don't think you can "prove" conclusively any kind of "What if" scenario, can you? You can look at what happened and make a guess at what might have happened next but it's still just a guess. Plus, how you interpret facts and the facts you choose to look at (not to mention the facts you choose to ignore) are going to be determened by your Weltanschauung. It is in no way clear that Japan was going to surrender soon. Some of the "big six" wanted to, but three of them (the military factions) were dead set against it (wanting to fight to the death). As a matter of fact they were so dead set against it they tried to initiate a coup to overthrow the other three. The only reason Japan surrendered is because the other "three" taped the Emperor's surrender message in case the Emperor was captured and held by the coup leaders. The tape was played on the radio and that was it. Once the people of Japan were told to surrender by the Emperor that is the only thing they could do. The military had no choice but to comply. (Of course, the preceding look at the "facts" is colored by my Weltanschauung. )
I get your drift but your point is illegitimate. In the first place, he couldn't wipe out our civilian population. Please don't exagerate. Even a man as deceitful as Saddam knows that such nuclear action by Iraq would bring about nuclear devastation for Iraq by the US almost immediatelly. Saddam is not motivated by his 72 virgins in Paradise. He wanted (and probably had) them in the here-and-now. That wasn't true in 1945 with our decision to crush Japan. They had no such option. Only we did. They assaulted us at Pearl Harbor and we spanked them badly for it. Now we are friends.
Hey while we're busy with Iraq... http://www.janes.com/security/international_security/news/fr/fr030521_1_n.shtml Dirty doings in the Balkans Unconfirmed but intriguing reports have reached us that organised criminals in the service of international terrorism are taking over the illicit trade in nuclear materials along the traditional Balkan smuggling route. The reports come from Russian, Serbian and US sources. These reports also speak of increased activity in the area by Islamic terrorists. Serbian and Russian sources say the terrorists have recently held a secret conference in Bosnia. They believe that a permanent terrorist cell is already functioning in Bosnia and that others are now being set up in Moldova. In an analysis of 14 cases of theft involving significant quantities of plutonium or weapons-grade uranium in the former Soviet Union, Scott Parrish of the Monterey Institute of International Studies detects the involvement of organised criminals in the Middle East and Asia. He believes the traffickers follow the traditional southern smuggling routes through Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Balkans. His conclusions are supported by Vladimir Orlov, a senior figure at Moscow's Centre for Policy Studies, who at a specialist conference recently described an unsuccessful attempt by the Russian mafia to obtain weapons of mass destruction for foreign interests. What is at stake here? There are an estimated 1,350 metric tons of plutonium and highly enriched uranium, enough for 40,000 nuclear weapons, stockpiled in Russia as well as in Kazakhstan, Belarus, Ukraine and Uzbekistan - in addition to potentially lethal material suitable for use in 'dirty bombs'. Several criminal-controlled Russian companies operate transport companies, say Phil Williams and Paul Woessner of the Ridgway Centre for International Security Studies. They argue in a discussion paper (published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London) that the familiarity of criminal enterprises with export licensing and their ability to corrupt officials and hide illicit cargo in legal consignments could all assist nuclear smuggling. 300 of 600 words
