The Morality Of Bombing
On August 6, 1945 the American Air Force incinerated Hiroshima, Japan with an atomic bomb. On August 9 Nagasaki was obliterated. The fireballs killed some 175,000 people. They followed months of horror, when American airplanes firebombed civilians and reduced cities to rubble. Facing extermination, the Japanese surrendered unconditionally. The invasion of Japan was cancelled, and countless American lives were saved. The Japanese accepted military occupation, embraced a constitutional government, and renounced war permanently. The effects were so beneficent, so wide-ranging and so long-term, that the bombings must be ranked among the most moral acts ever committed. . . .
Had the United States negotiated in 1945, Japanese troops would have returned to a homeland free of foreign control, met by civilians who had not confronted defeat, under the same leaders who had taken them to war. A negotiated peace would have failed to discredit the ideology of war, and would have left the motivations for the next war intact. We might have fought the Japanese Empire again, twenty years later. Fortunately, the Americans were in no mind to compromise.
President Truman demonstrated his willingness to bomb the Japanese out of existence if they did not surrender. The Potsdam Declaration of July 26, 1945 is stark: “The result of the futile and senseless German resistance to the might of the aroused free peoples of the world stands forth in awful clarity as an example to the people of Japan . . . Following are our terms.
We will not deviate from them. There are no alternatives. We shall brook no delay . . . We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces . . . The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.”
The approach worked brilliantly. After the bombs, the Japanese chose wisely.
Read the whole thing.
Apply this line of thinking to the Israel/Hezbollah situation. Many are complaining that the Israeli response to Hezbollah has been “disproportionate,” yet wouldn’t it be a better thing for this matter to be put to bed once and for all? Hezbollah (along with Hamas and other groups/nations) have been attacking Israel for decades. Time after time diplomacy has been attempted and derailed when the religious extremists of one faction or another resume attacks on Israeli military and civilian targets once again.
Unless we want these hostilities to drag on for decades more, at the expense of many more lives, I think it is time to let Israel show its enemies that it will not hesitate to obliterate them until they finally agree to recognize that Israel actually exists and to quit trying to drive the Jews into the sea.
