Got WMD? Just listen to Chemical Ali...

Read this Chemical Ali quote from Human Rights Watch's dossier:

"I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The international community? F_ck them! the international community, and those who listen to them!... I will not attack them with chemicals just one day, but I will continue to attack them with chemicals for fifteen days."
http://www.hrw.org/press/2003/01/iraq0117.htm

Of course, this was in 1988 and in reference to murdering Kurds. It doesn't vindicate Bush now. However, could any humanist countenance such Hitlerian notions (I'm thinking of the Armenian genocide) as this?

--Orson

 

1) How would you feel about a (hypothetical) American official in 1945 who said, "I will kill lots of Japanese with nuclear weapons. Who is going to say anything? I will bomb not only Hiroshima, but Nagasaki as well, before they have a chance to respond"?

2) How many Kurds were actually killed with chemical weapons? (By all means, let's try Ali for genocide, but not on his intentions alone. We have to look at how far his intentions were carried out.)

3) What is Arabic for "F_ck them!"? (Arabic-speaking demonstrators always seem to be chanting "Death to...")

 

Say what you will. The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved American lives.

How do you feel about the monstrous atrocities committed by Imperial Japan?

 

> The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved American lives.

If the Americans had first dropped a demo bomb on a deserted spot in Japan, how do we know the Japanese Emperor wouldn't have surrendered just as fast?

Would a chemical attack on the Kurds have been justified if it had saved Iraqi lives?

> How do you feel about the monstrous atrocities committed
> by Imperial Japan?

They were monstrous atrocities, for which the civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not to blame.

 

In Orson's defense, there have been documented atrocities against the Kurds (and others) in Iraq, with thousands of deliberate civilian casualites; Google the phrase "Anfal Campaign". Saddam is/was one of the most notoriously sadistic dictators of recent memory; he would do things like chop dissidents up and leave the pieces on their doorstep for their young children to find. If military officers proved disloyal, they faced being burned to death in acid baths. I think a distinction should be made between the very specific, military nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki--which were horrible, slaughtering about forty times the number of civilians killed on 9/11 (and maiming countless others), and should never be repeated, however much they might have been necessary or seemed necessary at the time--and long-term, gratuitously vicious oppression targeted against dissidents and specific ethnic groups within one's own country.

I share Molly Ivins' belief that a humanitarian case could have been made for war in Iraq (even on the sole basis of relieving U.N. sanctions, which may be partly responsible for the literal deaths of millions); for whatever reason, our president chose not to make one. I suspect this is because Republicans tend to oppose waging war on a humanitarian basis (that's called "nation-building" or "being the world's police," both charges leveled against Clinton by Bush in the 2000 campaign), and because Bush's real objective was to come across as a 9/11-style protector and use the war as a campaign piece for 2004 (which is probably why he took advantage of the flightsuit photo-op, began discussions of U.S. military action with the phrase "I will..." as if he were actually going to Iraq himself, and so forth).


Cheers,

 

Saddam was our friend when he attacked Iran and our enemy when he attacked Kuwait. It seems we judge others by who they kill and not by how many. Saddam was a dictator and a killer, but was small potatoes compared to Hitler and Stalin. We made him as famous as the greatest killers of all time, but he was really only another dictator and nothing special. Now he will be remembered for a thousand years. We made a mountain out of a hill.

 

When you say "within one's own country", you have to bear in mind how arbitrarily national boundaries are sometimes drawn. Aren't the Kurds being kept as part of Iraq against their will as a favour to Turkey, or something?

I'll gladly express horror at human rights abuses in general. Iraq certainly had a bad human rights record; and in general, the U.S. has a good one. I just felt it was hard to get excited about the particular statement ascribed to Ali above.

We could make a list of the countries with the worst human rights abuses, or a list of the countries that posed the greatest threat to U.S. or world security, and invade them one by one. Do your really think Iraq would have topped either list?

If we felt guilty about the effects of the U.N. sanctions -- and yes, we should have felt guilty -- then we could have aerially dropped food and medicines on the Iraqi countryside, without invading.

 

The U.S. only had two nuclear bombs, and it took both to prod the Japanese to surrender. If dropping the first bomb on Hiroshima, an actual city, didn't convince them to surrender, why in the world would a demonstration on a deserted spot do the trick?

The Japanese were not going to surrender. An invasion of mainland Japan would have cost millions.....yes, millions of Japanese & US lives. Look no further than their fanatical defenses of Iwo Jima, Okinawa, etc.

Harry Truman made one of the toughest decisions ever, but in retrospect it was the best option for a situation barren of them.

 

The example of North Korea demonstrates how docilely the US acts when countries really do have WMD, and the example of Iraq demonstrates how aggressively the US can act when they don't.

I wonder what lesson the rest of the world will draw from that.

 

Bruce writes:

> The U.S. only had two nuclear bombs [...]
> An invasion of mainland Japan would have cost millions.....yes,
> millions of Japanese & US lives.

How long would have it taken the US to make a third bomb? And how many lives would it have cost to wait that amount of time? Fewer than "millions", I'm sure.

> If dropping the first bomb on Hiroshima, an actual city, didn't
> convince them to surrender, why in the world would a
> demonstration on a deserted spot do the trick?

Are you sure the Japanese were given long enough to react to Hiroshima before Nagasaki was bombed?

> The Japanese were not going to surrender.

I understand it was a personal decision of the Emperor to insist on surrender. I don't see how you can predict with such confidence how he would have reacted to other approaches.

 

From my (albeit fading) recollection, members of Japan's Imperial cabinet (council or whatever) were evenly divided on the issue of unconditional surrender even after Hiroshima. Hirohito, himself, broke the deadlock but that was (at least) several days after Hiroshima (the day Nagasaki was bombed, at the earliest).

 

It took years to make the ones we had. And, you have the somewhat naive impression that Japan would have suddenly surrendered if we dropped a bomb in a deserted area. What would that have accomplished? We leveled one of their biggest cities (Hiroshima) and they still didn't surrender.

As Homer mentioned above, they had already decided against surrender. These were fanatics.

As I mentioned, look at Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Tarawa, etc. Almost no prisoners were taken in those battles, because they fought to the death.

A lot of people seem to forget that Japan drew us into WWII, not the other way around. During war, people get killed. That's a regrettable but irrefutable fact. The Emperor and other leaders of WWII Japan are responsible for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no one else.

 

> It took years to make the ones we had.

Years to make them, or years to figure out how to make them?

> What would that have accomplished?

Ronald Knox wrote a book about this, God and the Atom.

"Would the moral have been lost on our enemies? Not, I think, in the long run. They might have thought us fools, but it would have impressed them to see that we had a bushido of our own. Meanwhile, it would have restored, incalculably, our own self-respect."
-- http://tripping.seeto.com/history/2001/20010916.html

 

Both.

One man's opinion, worth no more than yours or mine just because it's in print.

 

The same question should be asked of the "humanists" that live at 10 Downing Street and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue who start a war based on a lie, and then find new reasons to justify the initial attack.

 

Re: Re: Got WMD? Just listen to Chemical Ali...

When a person wants a war, he willl find the excuse to start one. This was a continuation of the first Gulf war, a family feud between Saddam and the Bush family. If people spent the same amount of effort avoiding war as looking for one, we might avert war, not all, but most of them. We have a saying in the Deep South, a rich man's war and a poor man's fight. How many son's and daughter's of the power elite are in Iraq?

 

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

It's unfortunate that Mark would not have been available to explain his pansy attitude to mothers of Allied soldiers who would have died if the sure means of ending the war were not used.

I have words for people who like to second guess or rewrite history.

 

As (possibly) the only poster who had a relative who was a resident of Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped, I think it was the second best decision ever made by Truman. The best was sacking MacArthur.

 

Aren't American soldiers dying as we speak? But that's OK, so long as we're not pansies, right?

Father Knox was certainly available to those mothers, and my father feels the same way he did.

 

There are those who would believe that by eliminating hostile regimes, the US is saving lives in the future.

Passiveness didn't save 3,000 people in New York.