Eighteen year terms, looking better all the time.

What kills me is that I swear Nino isn't stupid or delusional like that. He's just evil.

Who's Jack Bauer?

If civil rights are to be curtailed during wartime, it must be done openly and democratically, as the Constitution requires, rather than by silent erosion through an opinion of this court

Eeeeevil!

Likely Scalia's entire dissent in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, co-signed by Stevens evinces evil as well.

Baa, did you actually agree with the Scalia/Stevens dissent in Hamdi? Because if you do, then I have to assume you think the president of the United States is a criminal, and if you don't, I assume you're just scoring points.

No, that was excellent work. Doing a good thing doesn't make him a good person, though.

I always assumed that you had to be really smart to be a supreme court justice, but I'm starting to think this might be a good gig to try to get in on. What are the prerequisites, anyway? I should point out now that I prefer a business casual dress code, and I've only seen seasons 1, 2 and 4 of 24.

This guy is supposed to be a legal genius. Like Bork.

Aren't Supreme Court Justices not supposed to say shit like this in public?

9: If Scalia didn't say stuff like this in public, how would we know he was batshit insane? Other than the vast majority of his legal opinions, that is.

I don't see what is wrong with pointing out that a fictional character, beloved by millions, probably wouldn't be convicted by a jury. Like OJ.

What is "legal genius" supposed to mean?

I don't think there's any explicit rule, just a tradition of discretion by the justices, and we all know how that goes. In other news, I'm holding all of baa's comments in moderation forever at an undisclosed location.

7: You can wear whatever you like under the robes.

He really is very bright -- bright enough to know that talking about the ticking-bomb fantasies of a bunch of Fox screenwriters as if they could cast any useful light on the morality or practical usefulness of torture is insane. Which is why I say evil -- if I thought he were stupid, that would be an excuse.

What are the prerequisites, anyway? I should point out now that I prefer a business casual dress code, and I've only seen seasons 1, 2 and 4 of 24.

A greater work ethic than that, at a minimum. Season three is on DVD.

8: And I think the "he's a legal genius" thing is mostly based on his tendency to crack snotty jokes in oral argument. He may be a gibbering loon with an incoherent legal philosophy, but oh, that acid tongue!

What are the prerequisites, anyway?

None. A middle-schooler could sit on the bench, if the Senate got drunk one afternoon or something.

But he couldn't touch the other judges.

Oh, I'm definitely just scoring points. The points to be scored, however, are against over-the-top denunciations of (basically) principled political opponents. I think that can proceed without committing me to any particularly substantive political/moral entanglements. For example, I think calling *any* current supreme court justice evil on the basis of their jurisprudence is ludicrous, even if one believes their positions have wicked consequences. And with that, I'll drop out. This seems like a good thread for Idealist rather than me...

11 is some funny shit.

I just have to say that I read this article over the weekend and wished I could see it discussed here. Bloody scary stuff folks.

16: Isn't that the sort of thing that you can get your clerks to do?

17: No, if you read his opinions in an area of law where he isn't corrupt (or, to put it more kindly, policy driven at the expense of law and precedent), they're excellent -- clear, well founded, and sensible. He really is bad rather than stupid.

I'm more or less with 11; from the bit of context in the article, it sounds more like Scalia was calling everyone on their presumed hypocrisy. Of course you wouldn't convict Jack Bauer! The problem is that Jack Bauer is a a fictional character and that when he tortures, he's always right, and that is not what is reality is like.

What worries me about Scalia isn't the quote, it's that his jurisprudence seems to be 'let the legislature decide' except when that doesn't get the decisions he wants. That and he seems to think that 24 is a documentary.

20: Thomas has come out in favor of prison brutality, as long as the sentencing judge doesn't explicitly call for it. Is baa working under some definition of "evil" that doesn't include this?

Is it only evil if Clarence himself bounces the prisoner's teeth off the curb?

The points to be scored, however, are against over-the-top denunciations of (basically) principled political opponents.

Principled, my ass. Scalia's positions on Bush v. Gore and Gonzales v. Raich, just to tick off two, fly in the face of any philosophical identity the man has laid claim to other than "right-wing hack." He has his prejudices and his agendas and he shapes his "original intent" to fit whatever they are at the time. That his opinion in Hamdi is incoherent next to his this latest public outburst isn't surprising in the least; the man has no principles to speak of.

17, 24: He is a superb writer. He is a very smart man, but is overrated on the basis of his writing. Breyer is smarter, and Thomas more intellectually consistent, but neither has as much cred because they don't have Nino's expert blend of both flashy and lucid.

The points to be scored, however, are against over-the-top denunciations of (basically) principled political opponents.

See, baa, if you think it's possible for a principled person who isn't an idiot to believe in a principled fashion that 24 sheds useful illumination on the moral and practical problems in deciding whether or not we as a country should hire people to torture our prisoners, that's very strange of you.

Obviously, it is possible that some people in the public eye are unprincipled. When someone says something as patently lacking in any reasonable moral grounding as Scalia, there's not a thing wrong with pointing that out.

What, because he's sitting on the Supreme Court bench he's a priori an upstanding moral guy? I don't think presidential appointments work that way.

28: I think that's right. He has a gift with the language.

9, 10: That's the thing. There's something breathtaking about his open contempt for the law and for public opinion -- it's the same hubris verging on insanity that has prevailed elsewhere in the US government recently, but Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al. seem like mealy-mouthed pikers next to Scalia. It's a pity Klaus Kinski is dead, because he'd be great in a Scalia bio-pic. Maybe Alec Baldwin could pull it off.

I'm more or less with 11; from the bit of context in the article, it sounds more like Scalia was calling everyone on their presumed hypocrisy. Of course you wouldn't convict Jack Bauer! The problem is that Jack Bauer is a a fictional character and that when he tortures, he's always right, and that is not what is reality is like.

That's not at all what I got from the context of the article:

The conservative jurist stuck up for Agent Bauer, arguing that fictional or not, federal agents require latitude in times of great crisis. "Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. ... He saved hundreds of thousands of lives," Judge Scalia said.

He's using a fictional character as an example of a hypothetical for judging reality. It's the same ticking time bomb scenario we've all heard from every crank warblogger coming out of the mouth of a Supreme Court justice.

Thats actually a misrepresentation of Thomas' position. He was arguing that extrajudicial conduct by prison guards isn't salient to whether the sentence assigned by the judge is cruel and unusual. It may be illegal or whatever, but since the judge has no control over that type of thing, it can't make his sentence cruel and unusual if it wouldn't otherwise be.

This position is almost certainly wrong, but it's at least colorable. Unlike a bunch of Nino's horseshit.

30: Just like Satan.

I'm actually worried, sj, that Scalia's right about what a jury would do. Most people seem to be for torture because 'we have to show we're tough,' Maybe I'm just pessimistic, but I don't think that if we had a trial for someone accused of torturing for a minor thing, let alone saving L.A., that most public opinion wouldn't already be in Jack Bauer territory.

In other words, I really don't want this one to go to the legislature. That's what the courts are supposed to be for.

I agree with Heebie that a taut, fresh middle schooler of either gender on the Court would be a distracting temptation for the other judges and should not be allowed under any circumstances.

24: Eh, truth be told, I don't think it always works that way. He wrote an unintelligible footnote on the McCarran/Ferguson test for deciding whether somethings is saved under the insurance exemption in ERISA a few years back. I think it had to do with a Kentucky law about PPO's and any willing provider or something.

The bulk of the opinion said that they were no longer going to employ the McCarran/Ferguson test, because it really wasn't workable, but then the footnote about what qualifies as insurance regulation makes no sense.

Both of Kentucky's AWP laws apply to all HMOs, including HMOs that do not act as insurers but instead provide only administrative services to self-insured plans. Petitioners maintain that the application to noninsuring HMOs forfeits the laws' status as "law[s] . . . which regulat[e] insurance." §1144(b)(2)(A). We disagree. To begin with, these noninsuring HMOs would be administering self-insured plans, which we think suffices to bring them within the activity of insurance for purposes of §1144(b)(2)(A). Moreover, we think petitioners' argument is foreclosed by Rush Prudential HMO, Inc. v. Moran, 536 U.S. 355, 372 (2002), where we noted that Illinois' independent-review laws contained "some overbreadth in the application of [215 Ill. Comp. Stat., ch. 125,] §4--10 [(2000)] beyond orthodox HMOs," yet held that "there is no reason to think Congress would have meant such minimal application to noninsurers to remove a state law entirely from the category of insurance regulation saved from preemption."

And ERISA'/ tax type stuff is a pretty technical area, where, despite underlying passions, judges tend to be fair.

36: S/B "any gender". How old-fashioned of me.

>Something as patently lacking in any reasonable moral grounding as Scalia

And what was that again? That you wouldn't convict Jack Bauer? Some off the cuff comments about 24. If you've got a long train of reasoning that points to Scalia being evil, fine. But to move from the material in that article to the conclusion Scalia = evil man seems pretty silly.

This is precisely why so much of our research is unfettered by dogma. Television trains us in its own educated and unbiased tradition.

Eighteen year terms, looking better all the time.

Yeah, I think that reexamining the Judicial branch may be more effective than say, abolishing the electoral college.

I like to fantasize that all the judges, under the robes, have bodies of nubile young 7th graders. Budding breasts, wispy pubes, that kinda thing. It's how I make it through my day.

42. Butter face.

Baa, torture is a matter of serious policy discussion these days -- you may not have noticed it, but it really is. And a feature of the serious policy discussion is that (1) real world situations where torture occurs never involve ticking bombs, atomic or otherwise, but (2) people justifying the necessity of torture keep on bringing them up, because without them it's awfully hard to come up with a good reason that you need to shove objects up the anus of a restrained prisoner.

If you think that discussions of whether or not torture is justifiable are morally important (I do) and you think ticking bomb arguments are obvious bullshit in this context (as I also do), then someone bringing up 24 as if it described a real 'ticking bomb' situation where torture would be necessary is either a moron, or a very bad person. You can disagree with me about the moral importance of torture, or you may take the bold and interesting position that 24-based ticking-bomb arguments are a useful representation of reality. But if you agree with me on those points, my characterization of someone speaking as Scalia does is stupid or evil stands.

I have the greatest of respect for Justice Scalia's intellect.

What's the import of Scalia being evil, anyway? Do people think that if only we could find nine "good" men or women, all would be right with the law? And thus the country?

One problem is that 24 itself has created the public opinion Cala is talking about and for a public servant to celebrate that fact is abominable. Jack Bauer is the friendly face of torture. You have to think Scalia gets this and is using it, and that makes him a bit of a bastard.

The man can write. Today my time machine fantasy will involve going back to the moment that young Scalia dropped his law school applications in the mail and forcing him, instead, to attend an MFA program somewhere. Does that go too far? It does, probably.

"Lives, fortunes, and sacred honor"

The constitution is a suicide pact. Better ten murderers go free (like OJ, if he were guilty) than one innocent man imprisoned;better 100000 die than habeus denied and torture accepted. Seriously, if I had to choose...well, never mind.

I think Scalia does have principles, although not the originalism or textualism he professes. More a fanatical traditionalism, conservatism, majoritarianism such that if Ole Miss wants to whip its darkies and wimmens, well, thems their community values, and who is little him to tell them what's right. He is a hateful little fuck, but I hate Roberts & Alito more. They're slicker. I knew Roberts would shift Kennedy to the right.

45: It'd help, don't you think? The combination of competent and good is most of what you need.

One thing we've learned over the last five years or so is that our leaders are really mediocre human beings. A system where you have to be insanely ambitious and (in the case of the the Repubs) ideological to claw your way to the top will tend to push such people to the top. The cult of "Scalia the genius!" is just meant to blind us to that fundamental mediocrity.

Actually, Scalia's behavior at that panel reminds me of a lot of people I've known who were precocious students and tend to shoot from the hip and bullshit a lot, feeling no obligation to reflect on the problems behind their position. Such types are almost encouraged in areas like the law, which require a fast mouth and advocacy skills but not necessarily much real intellectual firepower or scientific effort to track the truth. People in more genuinely scientific areas are often more modest.

Heebie is a lesbian. We know that now. And an ephebephile. And also prejudiced against old, tired people with slack, sagging bodies.

it's awfully hard to come up with a good reason that you need to shove objects up the anus of a restrained prisoner

You overstate your case, ma'am.

Tim, evil is not as ineffectual as good. That's one of the fundamental principles of thermodynamics.

Marcus makes good points.

Sometimes I wish the states could be deunified so that everyone could have a more responsive government.

Evil will win because good is dumb?

And on "Scalia the genius!" -- there's no such thing as genius in an area of practical wisdom like the law. Smarts are always helpful in assimilating raw information, but smarts are not at root what judgement is about.

What's the import of Scalia being evil, anyway?

Really, Tim? I bet if you really ponder you could make headway on this question.

God, Richard Cohen is fatuous, impervious fuck. His cheery pink-cheeked picture with the silly little glasses actually catches him pretty well. He's on the WaPo site right now explaining how Libby shouldn't go to jail.

Really, Tim? I bet if you really ponder you could make headway on this question.

Why don't you save me some time and just tell me, heeb. Better yet, list the Nine Good People You'll Meet In Heaven Who Should Be On The Court.

You overstate your case, ma'am.

That it's hard to come up with a good reason?

Read this short piece, SCMT. It's very logical.

55 has much truth. the cult of legal genius is a bit silly.

59: I was leaving out such compelling reasons as "For shits and giggles", or "Hell, who doesn't want to shove objects up the anus of a restrained prisoner." I believe Ogged was noting that omission.

re: 58

You don't really think that it'd be better for 'good' people to be in positions of power? Where by 'good' we mean something like 'tending to speak and act in ways that promote 'good' states of affairs'.

I really fail to understand your position here SCMT. Both here and in other threads where similar conversations have taken place.

One doesn't have to believe there's some metaphysically queer mystic property of goodness which some people possess in order to believe that placing venal people with the desire to promote 'the bad' in positions of power is a bad thing.

58 - I find that my students learn best when they have to work the answer out for themselves. I'll check your work for mistakes, though.

You don't even need good people. Ordinary neutral people would be fine. Bad people actually can do harm.

Tim has a knack for expressing loony, disjointed ideas in the form of simple common sense and tough-minded realism.

Tim may be drawing a distinction between 'good or bad people' and 'people who have demonstrated a propensity to commit acts that I consider moral or immoral'. If that's what's going on, I do basically agree -- I can't see within anyone's soul, and so on and so forth -- but it's too much work talking that way and I don't see that there's much point to it at this level of formality.

Heebie is now imagining Tim as a 13-year-old girl in a skimpy outfit.

50 heebie shot you down, eh?

You don't really think that it'd be better for 'good' people to be in positions of power?

Sure, if I had any faith that there was some easily cognizable characteristic called "good," and it meant that 'tend[ed] to speak and act in ways that promote 'good' states of affairs'. If "good" meant "what I want." Mostly, though, there are a broad set of interests I want protected, and I want someone who protects them. Deep down, I don't really give a fuck if the person who protects them is "good," I just want those interests protected.

54: Creative Evil always has a head-start, anyway. That's a big advantage in any conflict, right?

She even dissed my rockabilly son.

If you want to know the magnitude of the inappropriateness, Heebie barely makes 1/2 + 7 fr my son, who is 34.

One thing we've learned over the last five years or so is that our leaders are really mediocre human beings.

Narcisstic beggars, the lot of them. And not a dime's worth of difference between Donkey and Elephant. When the country was run by rich white men for the benefit of rich white men, they could concentrate on important stuff, like killing indians and building canals. Now that the country is run by mostly rich white men for the benefit of the mostly rich of whatever color or gender, they have lost focus, so we get killing of other brown people, but no canals.
Seriously, if our elected leaders had to submit to a psychological profile, do you think they would get any votes?

re: 66

Well, 69 suggests that's not what he's doing.

re: 69

I'm still not getting any kind of coherent position out of what you are saying here.

Is it that there's no such thing as 'goodness'? Or is it that 'goodness' is nothing more than the satisfaction of desire? Is it that it's nothing more than the satisfaction of your desires? Is it that there is such a thing as goodness but we are unable to identify it in any reliable way?

What?

Because here and elsewhere it seems like you want to resist the notion of moral value altogether.

Nader-Perot makes his appearance.

I'm too old for your son, John!

Hm, 41+ ?

We can play hot and cold!

You're getting warmer.

I don't really give a fuck if the person who protects them is "good," I just want those interests protected.

But it doesn't make any sense to think that an evil person will protect your interests.

Your initial objection wasn't to someone saying "our leaders must be Good;" it was someone saying "our leaders shouldn't be Evil." It's hard for me to see where, ceteris paribus, evil people can be expected to do much towards Good Government.

Heebie is now imagining Tim as a 13-year-old girl in a skimpy outfit.
http://www.petticoated.com/
Probably NSFW

Women 41+ are not supposed to be admiring their butts.

Because here and elsewhere it seems like you want to resist the notion of moral value altogether.

I'm saying that evaluating these sorts of matters through a moral value lens is not helpful. Many, many people think Bush is "good," even some who hate him. Some people think we're in Iraq (or still in Iraq) because of Bush's desire to do good. I think Bill Clinton is a right bastard who has a very flexible sense of right and wrong. I'd still love it if he were President because I think his ordering of betrayals to commit best protects a lot the interests I care about most.

Hmm. So, these interests you want protected, why do you want them protected? Seriously? Because they are in some sense 'good'?

We're just shifting around the focus of the moral value lens there, right?

I think his ordering of betrayals to commit best

Huh?

Gah, meant to add this on.

So the resistance is to a certain type of moral value talk, which you believe to be unhelpful, rather than to the notion of moral value itself?

I think that what LB was saying is that Scalia has definite goals, which are evil. He wasn't saying that Scalia was an opportunist centrist.

Clinton campaigned as a centrist against the liberal wing of the Democrats, and he governed that way, and t a great extent he really believes that. Scalia really wants to transform America in a certain evil way, and he's working at it.

82: Maybe. You're more conversant in this stuff than I am, so if that's the diagnosis, I'll buy it. But it seems to me that here, as in the prior thread, we end up making overbroad claims that people who are on our side, or would be on our side, find not credible. I was thinking, in part, of Cala, who I believe said she had a family member who is extremely anti-abortion. Is she supposed find that person evil? And if she can't--because she knows this person intimately, through daily contact, and, you know, "good"--should she throw up her hands with regard to Democrats because she can't trust their sense of "good"?

If Tim's point is that someone's merits as a SC Justice don't depend on their kindness to animals, pleasantness towards their spouse and children, and propensity towards giving money to street urchins, then, well, yeah. If his point is that on a policy level, what I would consider "good" and what some random other person would consider "good" are likely not to be exactly the same, then, well, yeah.

But I'm happy to use "good person," in this case, as a shorthand for, "Someone who supports the public policies which I think are not morally reprehensible, and acts, within the bounds of the powers of their office, to prevent policies which I consider morally reprehensible."

Regardless, do you think Clinton is, in any sense, evil? As in, is perfectly happy to see the sufferings and loss of rights of others? Because, with Scalia, that's what we're talking about. I don't give a shit if Bill or Nino cheats at golf, or if they're less than honest in personal dealings. Scalia has shown, over and over, that he doesn't actually care very much about the life and liberty of Others. For me, that's a decent approximation of Evil when we're talking about people without literal blood on their hands.

Oh, I was doing the math assuming the dominant male was 41+. I'm not that old, Pops Emerson.

And of course I'm throwing around 'evil' here, where I was the one defending my right not to firebomb the offices of coworkers with ghastly politics. I'll defend the difference by saying that I will cut people a lot more slack in getting morally important questions wrong where their answers are (and are known to them) to be practically unimportant. E.g., I call Scalia evil for making a 'ticking bomb' argument to a bunch of other judges, because of his power and influence -- when he says it, it matters. Joe Schmoe making the same argument is, I think, being a jerk, but it's the kind of jerkiness that can be overridden by other good qualities if he has them.

re: 86

Well, in the other thread, I was fairly clear that I believe the best way to describe certain people qua their moral qualities is to describe them as 'bad' [or using some other negative value term]. That doesn't mean I think we ought to go bandying it about willy-nilly and applying it to every single person with whom we have a disagreement over an issue of principle. And I think most people share that viewpoint . Tthe disagreement, as I said there, is over where best to draw the line.

I'd strongly defend the view that certain political positions are genuinely bad things to believe and that holding those positions makes that person a bad person, if the notion of badness has any coherence at all.

Of course, where I think we'd probably end up finding some kind of comity is that the best way to reason about these things is to look at what people actually say and do. If they say and do things that combine to promote what we believe to be good, then great. There's nothing mystical going on here.

do you think Clinton is, in any sense, evil? As in, is perfectly happy to see the sufferings and loss of rights of others?

What? Of course he is. What about Rwanda? Is it even possible to the president of the US and not be ok with letting lots of people suffer?

I think we're rehashing yesterday's thread, but I'm sympathetic to Tim insofar as the "evil" language is used way too often for my taste, but when it's impossible to find a good-faith justification for a policy, then I want to say that someone is evil.

As in, is perfectly happy to see the sufferings and loss of rights of others?

I think Clinton cares much less about that than one might want. (Rendition started under him, I think, though with greater protections.) But I think his coalition, and the people who support him, care a lot about that, and care about it in roughly the ways that I do. And I think his policies are likely to reflect his desire to please his coalition and those people.

BTW, Tim has an excellent point. Ever since the Republican party started calling various segments of the American populace immoral and/or evil (not to mention America-haters) - I would date it to Buchanan's barn-burner at the 1992 RNC - they have lost election after election. You can't win in America with that sort of judgmental rhetoric. You get far more success with detailed, technocratic policy proposals.

Eh, ogged, you really want to say that Clinton was "happy" at Rwanda? The way that, say, Scalia is happy at the thought of US-led torture?

I'm just going to go ahead and reject that outright, because you've got no evidence for it. Unable - even unwilling - to act to prevent something is not the same as happy to see it happen.

Well, "perfectly happy" usually means "willing to countenance," doesn't it? And there's the Rector execution, too, so...

94: For example, the 2000 and 2004 Presidential election, and the 1994 Congressional election??

Please rephrase.

No one was proposing making Scalia is Evil the keystone of the Democratic campaign. We were just saying that Scalia is evil.

re: 97

I think JRoth is being sarcastic in 94.

94: I know you're being sarcastic, but they arguably lost in '92, '96, '98, '00, and '06. They won in '94, '02 and '04. Hard to say the strategy has been an overwhelming success.

The article makes me feel ill. And then we have a serious discussion over whether it's fair to call Scalia "evil." Gross. Is that really the salient point here?

. Ever since the Republican party started calling various segments of the American populace immoral and/or evil (not to mention America-haters) - I would date it to Buchanan's barn-burner at the 1992 RNC - they have lost election after election.

My bet is that Republicans have a different summary, with different dates and specific language: the sixties, "racist," "misogynist," and "imperialist." And I admit I have a strong preference for technocratic(-ish) language.

I'd strongly defend the view that certain political positions are genuinely bad things to believe and that holding those positions makes that person a bad person, if the notion of badness has any coherence at all.

Moving this to a more abstract level, how do you feel about my proposition that the evilness of a belief can be ameliorated (not entirely, but some) by the holder's knowledge that it has no practical effects? Say, you have two people -- a white guy living in Georgia in 1960, and a white guy living in a backwoods town in Sweden. Both are fervent racists: the guy in Georgia throws rocks at little black kids being walked into newly integrated schools; the guy in Sweden doesn't actually do anything about it because he's never met anyone who wasn't Swedish.

I'd argue that while the Swede's racism says something bad about him, he is on some level justified as treating race relations as a minor moral issue because he knows he's very unlikely to ever shape his actions based on his beliefs about race relations, and so his evil beliefs are wrong in a sort of minor, frivolous way. The Georgian's racism is something that he knows will shape his actions toward people he meets every day, and so it's important, and says something fundamental about him.

Does this distinction work for anyone else?

The strategy was an overwhelming success. They controlled Congress for 12 years, the Presidency for 8, and both for about 4 or 5. After 1984 they crippled Clinton and the Democrats still haven't recovered fully. Overwhelming success.

re: 101

Technocratic language does *nothing*. It's pointless mouth-flapping when faced with the sorts of opponents that are being faced at the moment.

Well, you still need technocratic language for the primaries, to distinguish between the skills and policies of the basically sane and decent candidates.

Technocratic language does *nothing*. It's pointless mouth-flapping when faced with the sorts of opponents that are being faced at the moment.

As opposed to what? What does moralistic language do? Or some other type of language? Is there some theory of word-fists that I'm just not aware of?

Does this distinction work for anyone else?

Sure. To the extent that it's useful to judge, actions are more meaningful criteria than beliefs. In the case of a Supreme Court justice, of course, belief and action aren't so easily separated.

Tim has a knack for expressing loony, disjointed ideas in the form of simple common sense and tough-minded realism.

Technocratic language is how Dukakis won.

re: 106

Oh come on. Language plays many roles, as everyone knows. Technocratic language may be appropriate for certain kinds of detailed policy discussions, but in other contexts, speech-making, impelling people to action, whatever, it's just not the rhetorical tool to choose.

Sometimes intemperate, or aggressive, or stark or morally forceful language is the appropriate language to use. And repudiating the use of powerful rhetorical tools that have been been a staple of the left since time immemorial is just dumb. It's not just dumb, it's a kind of prissy dumb.

I don't believe for one second you aren't aware of this.

102: Does this distinction work for anyone else?

It works for many people re sexual fantasies, doesn't it?

I'd rather not waste the energy trying to figure out if someone is "evil", it's just another form of thumb-sucking. I'd rather find out what they can and can't do and then see what they do or don't do.

Figuring out someone's evil isn't a time-consuming process. Surely you don't budget that closely.

I'll just repeat, this country is so fucked.

Col. Klink, with the splintery broomstick, in the shower room.

m, in every paranoid sadist's toolkit

re: 102 LB, what if your Swedish racist is actually an egalitarian of the highest order? Wouldn't his egalitarianism also be inconsequential for the same reason? This is why no one gives a flying fuck about Swedish foreign policy, because they don't "matter". A racist is a racist, no matter how small, Horton. The opinion of people in power is no more or less important than those who are not in power. Actions, however, especially when infuenced by these opinions do make a difference, which is why it is nicer to be in power than not.

96: I think that "perfectly happy" is a bit strong for however Clinton felt about Rwanda. The phrase may be used sloppily, but let's not go overboard. Just because I haven't quit my job to protest in front of the White House 24/7 doesn't mean that I'm perfectly happy about its current occupant and his policies.

101: While racist, misogynist Republicans may object to being called that by straight-talking liberals, I'd be curious to know which major Democrats have used that language.

False equivalence really makes me nauseous.

TLL also has a knack for expressing loony, disjointed ideas in the form of simple common sense and tough-minded realism.

The opinion of people in power is no more or less important than those who are not in power.

102: I think the distinction holds in the sense that the Swede, though spouting hateful ideas, has not actually had his professed beliefs put to the test. He may, actually confronted with a black person IRL, find that he doesn't and can't truly harbor the hatred he had professed. The Georgian has been tested and, by the throwing of rocks, confirmed his racism. Which seems much the point you make with Scalia -- Joe Schmoe can support torture as an abstract idea while drinking his beer and watching Fox and it's a little different than someone like Scalia defending torture where his position involves dealing with torture as a concrete legal issue.

That was clumsily said. Bottom line, LB's distinction seems to hold some merit.

Actions, not words, JE. Do you really care whether GWB thinks Jessica Biehl has a cute ass or not?

I'd argue that while the Swede's racism says something bad about him, he is on some level justified as treating race relations as a minor moral issue because he knows he's very unlikely to ever shape his actions based on his beliefs about race relations, and so his evil beliefs are wrong in a sort of minor, frivolous way. The Georgian's racism is something that he knows will shape his actions toward people he meets every day, and so it's important, and says something fundamental about him.

Does this distinction work for anyone else?

Yes! This echoes what I said in yesterday's thread, about how people whose political opinions are idiotic or destructive may not be detestible if said political opinions make up a very small part of their personality.

(this may be rationalizing...I seem to be engaged to a person who claims she would vote for Giuliani over HR Clinton).

As always, the second paragraph of 118 is supposed to be italicized. Can't that macro be changed so that it only removes tags at the end of a post, instead of after every paragraph?

116: Right -- I'm willing to forgive the Swede for being frivolously stupid on an issue he knows has no practical effect, in the hopes that he'd get sane if it mattered. The Georgian had his chance to get sane, and didn't.

108: Yeah, it works in Massachusetts only. Dukakis is actually pretty cool. He was great about protecting neighborhoods from bad urban planning, but it doesn't scale well.

I was at a rally fro Deval Patrick on Boston Common. The mayor and every other minor Democrat/ person supporting Patrick was up on the dais. Dukakis was a few rows ahead of me, just standing in teh crowd liek anyone else.

(this may be rationalizing...I seem to be engaged to a person who claims she would vote for Giuliani over HR Clinton).

Oh, dear, that must be difficult. Hopefully she'll feel better soon.

And congratulations, on the assumption that she has many and powerful redeeming qualities to make up for that sort of thing.

Disengage, Ned. I'd say that anyway, of course.

We're really getting lost in the weeds here. But evil attitudes can affect actions, especially if the evil attitudes are specifically political, as in Scalia's case.

It's a dogma of some forms of liberalism and social sciences never to use ethical language at all, and it's a stupid dogma.

Technocratic language is how Dukakis won.

It works for mayors in general, if the city isn't in the midst of a panic about crime.

Or so I'd like to think...the Pittsburgh old-boy network is pretty strong, but I feel that the candidate with a monopoly on ideas is going to unseat our current nonentity in 2009.

Well sure John, if you're talking about a political figure, all of his opinions are relevant because they make up his ideology.

None of us is the median voter. Can we make that the blog motto until next November? None of us is the median voter. A political campaign aimed precisely to please any of us wouldn't even register with the electorate, let alone win. We're a bunch of grade-skipping, advanced-degree-holding, hyperliterate aesthetes, many of whom can hold down white-collar jobs while carrying on three or four imaginary conversations in our heads. The pollsters have no demographic for such people.

Ned, I married a man who was anti-abortion. Not until after I'd gotten him to agree that his opinion was merely an opinion, rather than a basis for legislation, of course. And I kept beating on him until he came over to my side.

So when President Inmypajamas of Iran says he will wipe Israel off the map, it doesn't matter until he can take action on it, i.e. get nuclear weapons. Good to know we don't have to worry about that.

125: Even more so in the case of the judiciary, because their opinions are their actions, and can have a profound effect on untold numbers of actual people.

Also, I had a gf who turned out to be an anti-Semite, but that didn't turn out well. I'd advise following B's example.

I've told the story here about how at one point during the spring when I started dating Buck, I said "Talk dirty to me," and he replied "I voted for Giuliani"?

We're a bunch of grade-skipping

Speak for yourself, elitist.

"Talk dirty to me," and he replied "I voted for Giuliani"?

So great.

Man, I'd never have sex with someone who was anti-abortion.

Grade skippers.

Speaking of weird opinions, an intimate of mine is very egalitarian concerning gays, but xenophobic about Mexicans and will say "nigger" at the drop of a hat. Very disconcerting, and nonsensical. She was raised in Southern California, not the "South".

128: Y'know, it'd be nice if people who made statements like this about Iran and its president and nuclear weapons remembered that the president of Iran does not control the Iranian military. Jesus fucking Christ, people.

We're a bunch of grade-skipping, advanced-degree-holding, hyperliterate aesthetes, many of whom can hold down white-collar jobs while carrying on three or four imaginary conversations in our heads.

Nope. Except maybe the imaginary conversations.

133: He was also Very Catholic, so that didn't, ah, come up.

135: Southern Californians are pretty racist, yep. A lot of my mom's side of the family is like that.

136. Like I said, I'm glad to know that the President of Iran has no influence whatsoever. This discussion being about evil opinions, and all.

We're a bunch of grade-skipping, advanced-degree-holding, hyperliterate aesthetes

...who still know jack shit about the leadership of a country we might go to war with within the next few months. Jesus fucking Christ and a half.

Southern Californians are pretty racist, yep. A lot of my mom's side of the family is like that.

The last refuge of the Klan was in Fallbrook. LA was very white for a very long time. Wasn't it Mencken that called it "Double Dubuque?"

Am I the only one troubled by this statement:

"So the question is really whether we believe in these absolutes. And ought we believe in these absolutes."

I thought that the law was supposed to absolutely draw a line between what's okay and what's not okay, and do it simply and clearly enough so that an odinary person doesn't have to guess whether his contemplated actions are criminal. Has Scalia turned into some sort of unmoored relativist, or a consequentialist, or abandoned the notion of neutral principles?

Like I said, I'm glad to know that the President of Iran has no influence whatsoever

Tragically, the president of this country - you know, the only one in history to actually use nuclear weapons on a civilian population, the one that illegally invaded and occupied Iran's next-door neighbor, the one that legalized torture a few months ago and stripped prisoners of the right to habeas corpus, the one where candidates for a major party's presidential nomination aren't debating whether we should use force on Iran but whether we should drop tactical nukes on the place - is both commander-in-chief of the armed forces and completely insane.

102: The swede doesn't know whether or not he has an opinion yet, or rather, he may without any consequence have one today, and a different one tomorrow. In fact, indigents' opinions about the virtues of Lexus v Escalade or voters' opinions about candidates are often like this-- only when there is action are people forced to confront themselves. Judges act with every holding they write. Voters either didn't know or didn't care about the consequence of their 2000 actions in 2004. Either way the US is in trouble, but trouble from the bottom up is more serious than trouble from the top down. On the other hand, the 1920s were worse, and the US recovered.

128: It matters (no matter the assertion that he doesn't control the Iranian military) because he has power and followers, and because there's evidence his desires and possibly available capabilities are converging. He's not the gibbering guy on the corner of Hollywood and Vine (before they turfed him to another neighborhood).

143- Not to change the subject, stras, but are you implying that the U.S. should not have dropped the Fat Man? That the invasion of the home islands would have been prefereable? Why not use the weapons at your disposal to end the war?

"Evil" isn't really part of my vocabulary. I couldn't think less of Justice Scalia, though, when he says something like I don't care about holding people. I really don't while ignoring something like No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury . . . nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.

Caring about people being held is his goddam job, and if he doesn't want it, there's surely plenty of people who'd be interested in actually doing it right.

(I like the older version too: Nullus liber homo capiatur, vel imprisonetur, aut disseisiatur, aut utlagetur, aut exuletur, aut aliquo modo destruatur, nec super cum ibimus, nec super cum mittemus, nisi per legale judicium parium suorum vel per legem terre.)

145: No, it really doesn't matter. First of all, Ahmadinejad's been losing support with the public over the last several months as the Iranian economy has gone south. He's been jeered in public on more than one occasion and burned in effigy; his political allies got their heads handed to them in the last round of local elections. This is not a man whose star is on the rise.

Second, his talk about Israel being "wiped from the map" simply can't be taken at face value; he's not crazy, he's using over-the-top rhetoric to appeal to hardline supporters. I'm sure this notion will come as utterly incomprehensible to voters in a country where a prominent presidential candidate answered a question about foreign policy by singing a song about bombing Iran.

Third, the power of the Iranian president is kept well in check by the panels of clerics who run the country; Ahmadinejad hasn't even been able to allow women to attend soccer games without being overruled.

The myth that Iran is run by a madman is necessary to inflate the threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb by promoting the notion that those crazy Muslims would totally launch a nuclear first strike against Israel - even though it would mean the nuclear obliteration of their country. But that's all it is: a myth. That supposedly educated Americans are still willing, after decades of Cold War propaganda, to believe that the guys on the other side always just happen to be suicidal maniacs, is deeply depressing.

Not to change the subject, stras, but are you implying that the U.S. should not have dropped the Fat Man?

I won't imply it, I'll outright say it. Incinerating civilians by the cityload: bad! I'm also against raping babies and garroting small puppies.

I'm kind of sick of the whole "Scalia is brilliant" thing. He's very clever and a gifted polemicist, but intellectually lazy. I think there was a time when his opinions were better than they are now, but now they reek of a guy who's been believing his own bullshit for far too long and who's discovered that it saves time if you skip over the figuring out the right answer part of the process and go directly to the rhetorical sales job.

37: IIRC Scalia has a major stick up his butt on ERISA preemption. He thinks that there's some sort of grand unified theory of preemption and that the Court should be applying it to ERISA and elsewhere. As a practical matter, that's meant that when Scalia gets hold of an ERISA case he uses it to ride his own personal hobbyhorses, reinterpret past ERISA cases in strange and interesting ways, and generally make the whole area even more incoherent than it was already (or at least that's how it was as of the last time I had to really get down in the weeds of ERISA preemption).

42: I like to fantasize that all the judges, under the robes, have bodies of nubile young 7th graders. Budding breasts, wispy pubes, that kinda thing. It's how I make it through my day.

Hmm. Likes math and very young women. Heebie is John Derbyshire!

146:

It's weird to me the way that people turn on a dime & get all utilitarian when confronted with Hiroshima & Nagasaki. It's directly contrary to the supposed moral justification of our actions in the war on terrorism: sure, at this point we've killed & caused the deaths of many, many, many, many more Muslim civilians than Bin Laden has American civilians. But we don't mean to, while he deliberately targets civilians, so we're the good guys.

Well, in Hiroshima & Nagasaki (& Tokyo, etc.), we deliberately killed tens of thousands of civilians. The argument that more people might have died as inadvertant casualties in an invasion & by frightening them into surrender fewer deaths were necessary--it's essentially terrorist logic.

In fact I think that total number of deaths & intentional killing of civilians are both relevant, so I don't totally agree or disagree with either of these stock arguments--and I don't know what you think about either. I'm just saying, the standard argument in defense of Hiroshima & Nagasaki totallycontradicts the standard argument in defense of our status as the good guys the war on terror.

Also, "Fat Man" was on Nagasaki, right? That one always seemed even worse to me.

Garroting large puppies and raping older children are more morally nuanced activities.

148. Of course the over the top rhetoric is for home consumption, just like McCain's was. But the confluence of events in that part of the world makes his statements particularly unwise. He is after all the public face of the country, and can't be laughed off the way Arafat's similar statements were.

152: What about feeding puppies to snakes?

First you feed a puppy to the snake, then you feed the snake to a mongoose.

Of course Fat Man was worse. Is there a plausible theory of the motivation behind Nagasaki that doesn't involve "showing Stalin we mean business"?

154: The article doesn't say whether it was a large or small puppy, so it's hard for me to judge.

Women 41+ are not supposed to be admiring their butts.

That is SO not true. Please, don't listen to him. He's just old and embittered. I'd like to take this moment to encourage all women, everywhere, of all ages, to be maintaining great butts. Please, feel free to join us in admiring those butts as well. I feel strongly about this.

151. Don't forget Dresden, Katherine. I said it before, war is hell. The lesson should be "Don't tread on me", but we've gotten all PC. Kill 'em all, let God sort it out.

156: of course there is: showing the Japanese we mean business. It was a horrible decision, but the Stalin angle's been really overplayed. There's good reason to think we were pushing hard for Japanese surrender, plain and simple.

First you feed a puppy to the snake, then you feed the snake to a mongoose.

It's like a turducken -- the monsnuppy.

Was it Stalin, or Tojo that we needed to convince? The Japs did not surrender right away.

He is after all the public face of the country

Which is why the wiser powers in Iran have put Ahmadinejad back in his box for the time being.

If a backwoods Swede falls in a forest, but doesn't land on a member of an ethnic minority, does it matter if Scalia tortures him?

"The Japs"? Jesus.

I know I'm being painfully PC but in the context of a discussion of the atomic bombing of Japan, could we maybe keep off the word 'Japs' and similar? (Clearly, just meant as an abbreviation, but in context it's making me wince.)

Or, what Brock said.

147

I think you are misunderstanding what Scalia was saying. The context of the quote was:

"... But the U.S. Supreme Court judge stressed that he was not speaking about putting together pristine prosecutions, but rather, about allowing agents the freedom to thwart immediate attacks.

"I don't care about holding people. I really don't," Judge Scalia said.

Even if a real terrorist who suffered mistreatment is released because of complaints of abuse, Judge Scalia said, the interruption to the terrorist's plot would have ensured "in Los Angeles everyone is safe." ..."

I dunno. The link I saw quoted the full context as:

"Justice Scalia, do you believe in holding a woman all night long, after making sweet rock-n-roll in the moonlight?"

"I don't care about holding people. I really don't," Judge Scalia said.

I personally believe in letting him live his private life as he sees fit.

146: We should have just pushed the Fat Man in front of the trolley.

This letter from historians to the Smithsonian concerning the Enola Gay exhibit provides some context generally left out of the debate. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden: monumental acts of terrorism.

165, 166, 167. Nipponese. Clearly my inner Bull Halsey speaking, no offense intended or implied, other than the intellectual endorsement of the incineration of hundreds of thousands of the enemy.

Are you kidding heebie? He is a Supreme Court Justice. What he does in his private life matters. Character .

150: Ten or so years ago I read Scalia's decision in a Louisiana evolution-in-the-schools case. In his lone dissent, he explained why creationism wasn't properly thought of as a religious doctrine. Since then, I have never been able to take seriously the praise for this guy's intellectual heft. Personally, I attribute that praise to the desire of nice people to try to find something nice to say about the useless prick, and his actual conduct doesn't provide many opportunities.

Are you kidding heebie? He is a Supreme Court Justice. What he does in his private life matters. Character matters.

160: Are you sure about that? Because as I recall, Japan had offered exacty the same surrender terms that were eventually accepted, 2 or 3 weeks before the bombs were dropped. They were originally rejected, though. If this is true, there was clearly no gain wrt Japan from the bombing. I could be misremembering reading this, or had it wrong in the first place, so I'm not sure.

175: Character used to matter, right? Empirically not so these days.

176: Right, didn't we give in on allowing Hirohito to remain as Emperor?

Hmm. I'm not sold. I don't know about the Stalin angle being "overplayed", as I've never heard it played: I came to this apparently dubious conclusion all by myself. The obvious argument is that if one nuke isn't enough to convince a conveniently irrational dictator to surrender, why should two do the trick? Was there some member of Tojo's general staff in a room somewhere calculating the optimal number of nuked cities to allow before surrender? Fat Man came three days after Little Boy, and was followed six days later by Japan's surrender. If Fat Man was the response to Japan's 3 days of non-surrender after Little Boy, why wasn't there a third nuke after Japan's continued intransigence? I'm not married to the Stalin interpretation, but it makes sense to me. I wouldn't mind being convinced otherwise.

176 isn't really right, but I'm not about to dig up the information or references necessary to correct it. I haven't read this, but I bet it's accurate enough to set things straight.

why wasn't there a third nuke after Japan's continued intransigence?

I think it's a little bit of both:

(1) We thought 2 would do the trick, and believe it or not didn't want to kill hundreds of thousands more civilians for no reason.

(2) We didn't have another one ready.

(I know those seem contradictory, but remember that there was more than one decisionmaker.)

178: That was my understanding; the one condition the Japanese specified, while allies were unwilling to accept anything other than `unconditional' ... until after the bombings.

179. There was no third bomb because we didn't have one. If we had, be sure it would have been used. The second was dropped to make the Japanese High Command unsure as to how many terror weapons we had, and to what lengths we were willing to go.

180: the link in 171 suggest it is though. This is all part of the reason I was unwilling to commit to my recollection being correct -- there seems to be a lot of different claims about it. Some things are simply factual:surrender with one condition was offere, Truman rejected it, eventually that condition was accepeted post bombing. The issue of Russias entry into the war, etc. is muddier.

179: really, you've never heard that? I think most historians that are critical of the decision play up the point that we were just trying to intimidate Stalin (which there's good evidence at least some of the top people were clearly trying to do, it's the "just" part that's a bit much).

184 cont: I should have added: as does the issue of the viability of original Japanes offer (who made it, would it stick, etc.)

Parsing the motivations of government actions is really difficult. James Carroll has an interesting discussion of the decision to use atomic bombs in House of War, and IIRC he concludes that it was motivated by a number of factors, depending on which decisionmaker you focus on (several key people influenced the bureaucratic process that shaped Truman's options and thinking): wanting to avoid a full-scale invasion of the home islands, wanting to impress Stalin, and wanting to secure continued funding and bureaucratic prestige for the Army Air Force.

I haven't done the reading so maybe I have it all wrong, but I've always thought that amidst all the other barbarisms and atrocities of WWII it would have been fairly shocking if Truman had decided not to use any weapon at his disposal. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atrocities, but so were Tokyo and Dresden, and the war in the Pacific was ugly and exterminationist more or less from the beginning.

That's not particularly a defense of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, but it's kind of odd to put a lot of energy into attacking or defending those decisions in isolation. In the summer of 1945, killing Japanese people was the U.S.'s #1 foreign policy priority.

OT: Are there any plans for a light, frivolous post today? I need somethign to cheer me up/ relax me enough to get my sluggish brain cells working.

DaveL gets it all exactly right.

Don't forget the revenge angle. Many people were really, really upset about Pearl Harbor, and figure that the Japanese had it coming.

Carroll also argues that the decision to require unconditional surrender of the Japanese pretty much made dropping the atomic bombs inevitable. The U.S. ended up accepting a surrender that was technically unconditional, but with the understanding that the emperor would remain on the throne.

I believe that we are talking past one another in a discussion where some are talking about what is and some are talking about what is to be done. Ontology vs. ethics, perhaps? I also think that if we are to speak of "evil" and "good", we should also speak of "chaotic", "neutral", and "lawful".

166: My sister, a Jew, is dating a Japanese man. They call each other "Jap".

188 is a good point. The atomic bombings tend to be looked at in isolation, but I think this is more because they are the only use of atomics, not because of knowingly attacking a civilian target (hardly a unique event, in WWII).

I wouldn't be surprised if it was a bit of a shock even to the people who about it, and what they could do. There has been a tendency to be defensive about their use in a `we had to do it, really' sort of way that is of course ridiculous, but beyond that the issues are muddy and tied up with all sorts of other horrendous choices and actions.

188, 190: Discussing the morality or lack thereof (and legality or lack thereof) of past U.S. military actions seems worthwhile. Defeating the Japanese, not killing Japanese people, was the legitimate U.S. policy priority in the summer of 1945. To the extent that we tried to achieve this goal by killing Japanese civilians, we were engaged in war crimes.

A lurker, dropping in to note: Some people are still proud of Scalia. I just recently graduated from his high school, and we have him painted into our murals.

He was very involved in our plays, back when he was a student, including "a humorous take on black religion." (If you own the New Yorker archives you can fact-check me on that.)

So the idea is that we dropped the second one at least in part to create ambiguity about the total number of nukes we had? That's plausible.

185: I'm sure I've heard it somewhere, but I'm not that into/knowledgeable about WWII history, which is why you've had to school me.

Parsing the motivations of government actions is really difficult.

Just imagine the fun historians will have 50 years from know trying to figure out the motivations behind the war in Iraq.

194. How does one describe an atomic bomb to President Truman? "Sir, we have a reaaaally big bomb to drop on the Japanese, can we use it?" "How big?" "Reaaaaaaaally big". "OK"

Just imagine the fun historians will have 50 years from know trying to figure out the motivations behind the war in Iraq.

Yep. This war is so overdetermined it's ridiculous.

Why not use the weapons at your disposal to end the war?

The amazing thing about the advocates of "whatever it takes" is that they never seem to be advocating thinking carefully about consequences and behaving intelligently, if that's what it takes. Is TLL in 159 really claiming that Dresden was a militarily useful action? Is TLL in 159 really endorsing the genocide talk that we're starting to hear these days?

Oops. I thought 187 and 188 were both written by DaveL. Turns out they're different? Huh. I feel I'm justified in treating handles that are only one character different from one another as identical.

159 is either not at all thought out, or sickening.

I've been trying to come up with a better handle ever since LizardBreath said she doesn't differentiate anyone with a firstname-lastinitial combo. Sorry.

but it's kind of odd to put a lot of energy into attacking or defending those decisions in isolation.

Fair enough, but it's worth putting a lot of effort into understanding why and how decisions were made to do unspeakably horrific things, and incorporating that understanding into our understanding of the contemporary situation. Katherine has it right in 151: it was essentially terrorist logic. Kyoto was originally intended to be a target precisely because its destruction would be so demoralizing to the civilian population, and was spared only after the intervention of War Secretary Henry Stimson, who had been there and knew its significance.

195: That's true enough in its way, but IMO it's an argument that total war is a bad thing, not that the people responsible for bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki were moral monsters.

It's also funny that someone gets called out for using the term "Japs" and not for deriding the genocide convention & prohibitions on massacring civilians as "PC".

I'm not so much into judging Truman's immortal soul & am not really objecting to what DaveL says...in context, it was understandable. We decided after the war to make certain rules to try to prevent that context *& those horrors from ever occurring again, and it wasn't "going soft" or being "politically correct".

203: Me too.

204: Right, but then I think you need to be looking at decisions about bombing targets in Europe in 1942 or 1943 on the Allied side, and at the Blitz. The precedent for bombing the hell out of civilians was established long before Hiroshima.

Some people are still proud of Scalia.

Let it not be said that I've never endorsed Scalia.

Katherine: It way 100's of thousands, not 10's. And yes, by any useful definition of terrorism, that's what these acts were. The only thing arguable is the efficacy and acceptability of terrorism as a state act.

207: Agree absolutely.

203: You two I have figured out now -- you I've met repeatedly, and Mr. L gets to live in Hawai'i, the lucky bastard. So don't go changing for me.

Any lurkers considering posting though, pick a distinctive handle if you want me to acknowledge your existence.

206: Well, one criticism could be made while allowing the discussion to continue, while the other couldn't, and this is one where, while I disagree with TLL, I'm genuinely unsure about 'total war', to the point that I'm interested in seeing it argued.

MAD raises some hard questions when you get into the question of whether you need to *actually* be willing to retaliate, & do so, for deterrence to work. I maintain that deriding a general prohibition on massacring civilians as "politically correctness" is one of the sickest fucking things I've ever read on this site.

208: For sure. Those targets, and Tokyo, helped pave the way. But even Robert McNamara says he recognized at the time that the firebombing of Tokyo would have been judged a war crime if the Japanese hadn't been defeated.

205: I agree with Katherine that judging Truman's immortal soul isn't the thing to do here. But I think it's important to judge actions like the bombing of Japan as a way of reflecting on our current choices. World War II is an important part of the myth of America as the City on a Hill, a myth that leads the American people to support so much violence. We need to face down this myth, and a reexamination of WWII is one way of doing that.

213: The thing is, we (Allies generally) did an awful lot of massacring civilians in WW II, not just by dropping the atomic bombs. And I am genuinely unsure to what extent those massacres were 'necessary' -- that is, to what extent they made a difference to eventual victory or otherwise.

I can imagine, while not myself having the knowledge to make or refute, a respectable argument that some of those massacres were necessary, and preferable to a surviving Nazi or Imperialist Japanese state. At which point the 'political correctness' remark remains horrible-sounding, but can be defended.

Is there a plausible theory of the motivation behind Nagasaki that doesn't involve "showing Stalin we mean business"?

Actually, IIRC, we sent the two bombs over & the instructions were "drop them when you can." There wasn't a second, separate order to bomb Nagasaki.

DaveL is correct that murdering thousands upon thousands of civilians was a policy of both the US and the UK well before Hiroshima. The worst bombing of the war, re: total casualties, was Tokyo, March '45 -- at least 90,000 dead, more likely over 100,000. People jumped into swimming pools to escape the firestorm, & were boiled alive.

The wickedness of area bombing is a pet subject of mine. Re: the A-bombs, Richard Frank in Downfall is persuasive to me on 3 points:

(1) We had another alternative to invasion -- blockade. Japan couldn't come close to feeding itself.

(2) Blockade would've killed a great many civilians; cf. the blockade vs. Germany in WW1.

(3) A quick end to the war, via the A-bombs, arguably saved a great many civilian & POW lives in territories occupied by the Japanese, including much of China.

Now, in absolute terms, I'm inclined to agree that we had a duty to invade, rather than use blockade *or* bombs, even at great cost to ourselves. But that was nowhere near the moral consensus in 1945.

And I agree with 215, but would emphasize that you really have to work your way through what sort of war it was, not pick out bits and pieces. You can't let people cop out with "those people were bad; I wouldn't do that."

In support of 216, the high-altitude bombing of Germany, which was horrendously inaccurate and inevitably killed loads of civilians, was found by McNamara after the war to have had very little impact on Germany's war effort.

My case was interrupted by a bomb threat, so I got to wait around for 4 1/2 hours until they cleared it.

If there was a vote, count me on the side of being in favor of admiring butts, despite my time in court today with an a-hole who is making a divorce too expensive.

218: Comity among the Daves!

About the A-bombs....

1. The precedent of bombing civilians went back to World War I, had been re-established during the Blitz and continued through use of V-1 and V-2 weapons; the Allies destroyed Hamburg in a firestorm bombing of 1943, then of course Dresden and Tokyo in 1945 (as well as other cities). More people were killed in the Tokyo bombing than in the atomic bombings.

2. The principal difference between the atomic bombs and the earlier bombings was quantitative: i.e., if it takes one bomb to destroy a city, you lose even the figleaf pretext that you are not trying to kill civilians. You are. (That is to say, it was the principal difference prior to the full understanding of radiation's aftereffects.)

3. You can make the argument, and people did and do, that it was more merciful to kill lots of people (including civilians) now if it ends the war sooner and prevents the killing of even more people (including civilians) later. This is a difficult argument and well out of the area of lawful war. Some people argue that more Japanese would have died in an invasion than died in the bombings.

4. After Hiroshima, Washington had no firm offer of surrender. They knew surrender was near; they didn't know how near. They might of course have waited a little longer; but we also can say....

5. The offer of surrender that came on August 10th stopped further bombing. A third bomb was supposed to be ready within a week. Truman had previously given, effectively, "fire when ready" orders for the bombing. Now he suspended that order.

6. All this kind of talk makes me sick to my stomach, but I don't know how else to think about the subject. Clearly it is not a guide for how to behave in a non-total war.

Shit, 20-something comments while I wrote 217.

Agree w/ Katherine that 159 is disgusting. Incinerating babies and their mothers, who have no measurable influence on the conduct of the war, is horrible.

gets to live in Hawai'i, the lucky bastard

LB, you have a standing offer of any help I can provide if you ever start pining for the Pacific so badly that you actually want to relocate, but this place has its good points and its bad points like everywhere else. Except for the places that just suck.

Rather than trying to justify genocide, which certainly has a lengthy history, let me just say that there is a difference between use of military force and war. I have fewer problems with using all weapons at your disposal when engaged in a "war", i.e. exsistensial threat, for which I believe WWII qualifies. Use of military force has and needs all kinds of ROE. "War crimes" mean different things to the winners and losers. Who was it said that America is great because it is good, and will ceast to be great when it is no longer good? This is why we should refrain from "war crimes" and "torture" as a matter of policy, because it changes who we are, and ought to be.

221: Like so.

Now, in absolute terms, I'm inclined to agree that we had a duty to invade, rather than use blockade *or* bombs, even at great cost to ourselves.

I had a couple of uncles who would helped hang some generals and politicians when they got back, if they had survived that invasion. I'll take the position, given the Japanese use of suicide bombers, their civilians throwing themselves off cliffs, their treatment of POWs and the Chinese and Filipinos, etc, that we had a "moral duty" to deliver some serious shock treatment to their whole society.

I should add regarding the last sentence of my point (1), actual casualty figures still get argued over quite violently. I should probably have said, the death tolls were very similar and some rankings put Tokyo higher.

222.6 gets it exactly right.

"War crimes" mean different things to the winners and losers.

Actually, Curtis LeMay was well aware that he was committing war crimes. He said so himself. He just didn't care, because his side won & he wasn't going to be prosecuted.

when engaged in a "war", i.e. exsistensial threat, for which I believe WWII qualifies

Japan was not "an existential threat" to the U.S. in August 1945. In both the Pacific and in Europe, we committed our worst atrocities when the war was already going our way & it was clear that neither Germany nor Japan could win. There may be some psychological "kick 'em when they're down" effect there, tho it would take a Ph.D. dissertation to begin to study *that* question ...

I'll take the position, given the Japanese use of suicide bombers, their civilians throwing themselves off cliffs, their treatment of POWs and the Chinese and Filipinos, etc, that we had a "moral duty" to deliver some serious shock treatment to their whole society.

Jesus fuck. This is an even clearer argument for "the bombings as terrorism" than Katherine's 151. Every terrorist in history has felt a moral duty to deliver "serious shock treatment" to their target society by killing civilians.

I feel guilty for 158 now. Here we are in the middle of an impassioned debate about the morality of dropping the bomb on Hiroshima, and I chime in on womens' butts.

On the other hand, a great butt is DA BOMB!

we had a "moral duty" to deliver some serious shock treatment to their whole society

Switch the pronoun antecedents and Osama bin Laden couldn't agree more.

I had a couple of uncles who would helped hang some generals and politicians when they got back, if they had survived that invasion.

Right. Politically, it wasn't an option. Which simply demonstrates how evil America had become, by 1945. When you fight monsters, etc.

we had a "moral duty" to deliver some serious shock treatment to their whole society.

Too repulsive for me to address. Sure, we had a moral duty to incinerate all the children in a city.

I'd argue that war crimes (in an actual, not technical sense) cannot mean different things to winners and losers. Insomuch as it makes sense at all, it is in absolute terms. What is actually different is the likelihood of prosecution. Corollary to this is I don't believe there is any sensible way to define a war crime that does not include certain actions `we' may have taken, e.g. Allied forces in WWII, etc. I don't think this is a bad thing.

Here btw are the words of a noted moral thinker on whether there's a duty to sacrifice "enemy" civilian lives to save one's own people. His answer was "you betcha."

When somebody comes to me and says, "I cannot dig the anti-tank ditch with women and children, it is inhuman, for it would kill them", then I have to say, "You are a murderer of your own blood because if the anti-tank ditch is not dug, German soldiers will die, and they are sons of German mothers. They are our own blood." That is what I want to instill into the SS and what I believe I have instilled into them as one of the most sacred laws of the future. Our concern, our duty is our people and our blood. It is for them that we must provide and plan, work and fight, nothing else. We can be indifferent to everything else.

I realize I may have misparsed TLL about war crimes, if what was meant was that war crimes have different implications for winners and losers.

There wasn't a whole lot left of Okinawa after the battle was over there. Arguing that the U.S. was under a moral duty to do it again on a much larger scale in order to avoid dropping the atomic bombs strikes me as ahistorical at best. There are arguments that the war could have been ended without either an invasion or the bombings, but in a straight-up choice between those two alternatives I have a hard time imagining a world in which leaders in the position of the U.S. leadership in August 1945 would choose invasion.

230. Japan was not "an existential threat" to the U.S. in August 1945. In both the Pacific and in Europe, we committed our worst atrocities when the war was already going our way & it was clear that neither Germany nor Japan could win.

This is the kind of PC nonsense that drives me up the wall. Unconditional surrender, those are the terms. 50 years post you have the luxury of information not available to the people actually fighting the war. Bio's 227 puts it well.

LeMay's knowledge of non prosecution is exactly what I mean about the difference between winning and losing.

All evidence is that the American leaders took these questions a bit more soberly than many of us are. Sure, plenty of Americans wanted to kill as many Japanese as they possibly could. One politician said something like, this was a total war when they started it and it shouldn't stop being a total war because they're losing. Which is of course entirely understandable.

But Truman and Spaatz (if not LeMay) gave evidence at the time -- not just retrospectively, as many self-serving people did -- that they were thinking as well as they could through the question of what was morally acceptable. Spaatz thought, as I mentioned in 222 point 2, that you couldn't even pretend killing civilians was an accident with the atomic bombs, and so didn't want to go on using them.

As to whether Japan remained a threat in August, the militarists almost regained control of the Japanese government after August 10th. Had they done so, they would have continued fighting. Their goal was probably to make it too costly for Americans to press for Japanese surrender. The Emperor's intervention on the 14th probably made the difference here, and it seems possible that he had this intervention forced on him by the Allied leafleting of the city, laying out the terms of surrender.

This is the kind of PC nonsense that drives me up the wall.

If by "PC nonsense" you mean "knowing what the fuck you're talking about," then yeah, sure.

"Unconditional surrender" was not imposed on the Allies -- it was *their* choice. So if you're saying the Allies were justified in committing war crimes by having demanded unconditional surrender ... well, then you're speaking the very opposite of PC nonsense, as defined above.

Unconditional surrender, those are the terms.

Not sure what this means. Unconditional surrender wasn't a natural fact of the war, it was the way the U.S. chose (against allied advice and pressure) to define its goal in the Pacific theater. Why did the U.S. demand unconditional surrender of a people they knew would sacrifice themselves to defend their divine emperor? The demand itself is what imposed the logic of Okinawa, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.

239: Right, ok we are on the same page about that. I misread you at first. The only caveat I have about this stuff is I feel strongly about states being honest about what they do. Admitting that the US state, for example, commited atrocities in WWII is in no way claiming it is equivalent to the German state at the same time, which also committed atrocities. Being introspective to some degree about these things is crucial to maintaining a realistic picture of ourselves. Japanese ahistoricallity about WWII is a good example of where this can go badly.

"Unconditional surrender" was not imposed on the Allies -- it was *their* choice.

A choice with some history of its own, it should not be forgotten.

What conditions would you have thought the Allies should have imposed that the Japanese would have found acceptable?

I am generally conflicted about the use of Atomic weapons in WWII. I think that as a means of inflicting civilian casualties they were different in kind rather than degree from the firebombings.

I do wonder, occasionally, whether the fact that atomic weapons were used in WWII has contributed to the fact that nobody has used on since? If they were never used, would someone have wanted to drop one sometime, but this is just curiousity, not a defense. Obviously that is not something that the decision makers at the time could take into account.

But, without endorsing it, it seems worth linking to Paul Fussell's Thank God For the Atomic Bomb (.pdf). He essentially argues that it's important to remember that the situation looked very different to the decision makers at the time, than it looks in retrospect.

As to whether Japan remained a threat in August

The question was, was Japan an "existential threat" to the United States in August 1945. They weren't, regardless of whether they kept fighting or not.

I agree that Truman & some other leaders at least *thought* they were considering the moral issues. I would however argue, as above, that they were so calloused by the war and so attuned to political, not moral, considerations, that their moral deliberations were both inadequate and incorrect.

Being introspective to some degree about these things is crucial to maintaining a realistic picture of ourselves. Japanese ahistoricallity about WWII is a good example of where this can go badly.

As is American ahistoricallity about WWII, for that matter.

(Leaving aside that we did not, in fact, impose unconditional surrender on the Japanese -- we agreed to respect the sanctity of the emperor.)

What conditions would you have thought the Allies should have imposed that the Japanese would have found acceptable?

Surrender with the preservation of the emperor on the throne and an assurance that he wouldn't be prosecuted for war crimes. I believe this is the content of the informal understanding that the U.S. and Japan reached before the actual "unconditional" surrender. And it only made sense in terms of preserving civil order in occupied Japan.

The thing I find so very fucking offensive about the term "PC nonsense" is the implication that thinking it might just possibly be immoral to deliberately incinerate hundreds of thousands of civilians is not only wrong, but ridiculous--along the lines of thinking that short people be called "vertically challenged." Just in case that's not clear. That is what makes me incapable of coherent response without cursing, & I can't believe people are defending it

The question was, was Japan an "existential threat" to the United States in August 1945.

I confess I don't know where "existential threat" comes in. How does that assessment fit into the moral calculus?

Why did the U.S. demand unconditional surrender

Pearl Harbor, plain and simple. (and by Pearl Harbor, I mean the attack on American interests in the Pacific, to include the Phillipenes, Wake, etc.). I the U.S. doesn't enter the war in the Pacific without it, giving the Japanese Empire the opportunity to consolidate its expansion.

245: I believe this was well understood at the time; they wanted the emperor protected from prosecution and allowed to remain emperor (as I understand it, as titular head of state, no policy power implied).

DaveB and I are not actually sitting in bed with each other typing identical comments, btw. Just wanted y'all to know that.

236: It figures. We're having a perfectly good thread about WWII, and somebody has to go and bring up the Nazis.

I've recommended A History of Bombing here before, and this seems like a good place to recommend it again. It addresses how racism, imperialism and terrorism were bound up in the development of aerial bombardment -- how the strategy of raining destruction from the sky was well suited to dehumanizing ideologies -- and it's as disturbing as you'd expect.

248: Yes, that too --- but there is no reason to constrain this to a `where US went wrong' sort of discussion.

252: Ask the Leech, he brought it up.

Katherine, I think there's no question that it's immoral to bomb civilians. I think I would have believed that in 1943. But I can't honestly say I would therefore have counseled Roosevelt or Truman that they must not wage a bomber war in either theater.

253: Which was a choice, as someone noted earlier. And not, in the end, what was accepted.

With all due respect, Jesus, I would not recommend Lindquist. It's a little too literary and maybe -- not to be unkind but --fictionalized. I think Robin Neillands's Bomber War is very smart and sober and extremely well researched.

257: topical ideas, given the air forces enthusiastic, bloody, and very ineffectual involvement in Iraq these days. I guess they don't want to feel left out.

252: Ask the Leech, he brought it up.

Okay, then. The implication seems to be that you need "existential threat" to justify certain tactics, and therefore once the "existential threat" has passed, you may no longer use those tactics. I'm not sure if this is what you meant, or if it's indeed anyone's idea of "just war" doctrine, or what. It's confusing, as I said.

253: Huh? Unconditional surrender was Allied policy from fairly early in the war. I've never researched why that was the policy, but I've always understood it to have been primarily a response to the failure of the Treaty of Versailles.

263: Indeed.

Roosevelt announced "unconditional surrender" at the Casablanca conference in January 1943. He did it because he didn't want to start negotiating postwar details with the British and Soviets from a position of weakness (which the U.S. then held with respect to its Allies). By announcing this policy he could defer detailed discussions of the peace until America had more leverage.

I've been skeptical of Neillands from what I've seen of citations to him, and if the Amazon description of the book is valid, I was right:

In this history of the Allied air war over Europe, Neillands maintains that the use of bombers as strategic weapons aimed at the enemy's ability to wage war--as opposed to purely tactical weapons aimed at enemy troops--necessarily involved the loss of civilian life and the destruction of nonmilitary targets, however unintentional. One such target was Dresden, a once-beautiful city that, some historians have protested, had no strategic importance and merely served as an example of what would happen to the rest of Germany should the fighting continue. Those historians are off the mark, Neillands counters: Dresden produced essential war materiel, such as military aircraft engines, shell fuses, and cigarettes ("a vital product for maintaining wartime morale"), and thus it was a legitimate target. So, he continues, were cities such as Berlin, Ludwigshafen, and Hamburg, the last the site of a firestorm that killed some 46,000 civilians. Their deaths were unfortunate, Neillands suggests, but necessary in ending Hitler's regime and in inaugurating an era in which total war is unthinkable.

And to nail those targets in Dresden, we had to burn down the whole city?

Max Hastings' Bomber Command or A.C. Grayling's Among the Dead Cities are useful for reminding us that terror bombing was the original purpose for the bombers and the publicly-unstated mission thereof.

I think that morally one is allowed to do just about anything to ensure your own survival. What that means to a society, as oppossed to an individual, is open for debate.

If the term PC offends, I apologize, but I have a real problem with judging the actions of people 60 years ago through today's rose colored glasses. To the extent that history informs, I'm all for reviewing the consequences of previous actions. And certainly, there are some actions that can not be justified at all. The dropping of the Atomic Bomb is not one of them, horrible as it was.

269: I don't think it was offensive, so much as badly misapplied. You have to be careful about judging past actions through rose coloured glasses, but you also have to be careful about judging past actions by decades of carefully applied whitewash.

265

It is my understanding that unconditional surrender was the policy because the Western Allies and Stalin didn't trust each other not to make a separate peace with Hitler.

268: Anderson, that's not "the Amazon description," that's a reader review, and it's not a good description of Neillands's story (cigarettes?!?). As I read the book, it's a story about how bombing can never be completely accurate, i.e., is always immoral; he makes a case that it can still be justified.

I don't think there's any question in Neillands or anywhere else of any seriousness that Harris et al. jolly well hoped to terrorize the Germans into surrender.

269: "Ahistorical" would be a more appropriate choice than "PC". More appropriate, but no less in error; are Iraqi civilian casualties widely seen as atrocious?

222 nails it: the utility of conventional strategic bombing was that it allowed the pretense of targeting materiel rather than civilians.

On a related note, has conventional strategic bombing ever actually worked? I'm not talking about bona-fide industrial targets like Ploiesti, but rather Dresden/Blitz style civilian stuff.

262: Bomber War is now on my to-read list, thanks. I wouldn't look to A History of Bombing for the history of bombing, but Lindqvist's approach is valuable in raising underlying cultural issues and bringing in details from the margins in an engaging, provocative way. I suppose he might have called it A Cultural History of..., but, you know, join the crowd.

has conventional strategic bombing ever actually worked?

Define "worked".

has conventional strategic bombing ever actually worked?

If by "worked" you mean "won a war," then no, not even Kosovo (Neillands makes this point). If by "worked" then you mean "reduced the infantry casualties necessary to win a war," then maybe.

"I have a real problem with judging the actions of people 60 years ago through today's rose colored glasses."

I think there is confusion as to who is wearing these glasses. From this thread, I'm sorry, I don't get the impression that you are "all for reviewing the consequences of past actions," but rather, that you are all for getting angry and spouting a bunch of vile nonsense.

Bomber War is now on my to-read list, thanks.

I think some Lindquisty points are more soberly made in Michael Sherry's Rise of American Air Power. I've also heard Ian Patterson flogging his new Guernica book, which seems similar, but have yet to read it.

Slolenr, that's the Amazon.com editorial review; it was by a "reader" inasmuch as non-readers are less qualified to review a book (though as Schopenhauer observes, that never stopped a reviewer).

There is a helluva difference between "our attempt at precision bombing nonetheless killed some civilians" and "let's burn them all to death." Arthur Harris's aim was the latter.

Shearer, Stalin was gratified by the Casablanca declaration but wasn't a party to it, so that explanation doesn't quite hold up.

274: Well, it worked on Japan. Some people point out that the Germans increased military production throughout the war, but the Allies increased military production much more, so I think it's reasonable to assume that bombing had an effect. After 1945 there was also a very noticeable lack of the sort of large-scale great power war that was previously thought to be an unavoidable part of world politics; I think this is pretty much entirely due to nuclear weapons. So it "works" in that sense, or at least the threat of it does.

But it seems that if you aren't willing to start chucking nukes around (as well you shouldn't be!) that random terror bombing doesn't really do much.

If you meant that it's easy to be judgmental in hindsight & that we don't actually know what we would've done in Truman's shoes, you might have tried saying so instead of

"war is hell. The lesson should be "Don't tread on me", but we've gotten all PC. Kill 'em all, let God sort it out."

That strongly implies that moving away from a policy of "Kill 'em all" was just softheaded political correctness & was a mistake.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard some variation of that post--usually in the context of Iraq, or the war on terrorism. Most of the time, it is NOT a serious argument that the prohibitions on torture/deliberately killing civilians/etc. is a mistake, because when our enemies massacre thousands of civilians we still want to be able to condemn for it. It's just a knee jerk way to defend your side.

After 1945 there was also a very noticeable lack of the sort of large-scale great power war that was previously thought to be an unavoidable part of world politics; I think this is pretty much entirely due to nuclear weapons.

Arguably WWII was bad enough to deter a repeat even if the atomic bombs hadn't been dropped.

it's reasonable to assume that bombing had an effect

Much *less* effect than it would've had, had we targeted Germany's petroleum production from the get-go. It was difficult in many respects, but once we got around to it -- after incinerating many cities -- that was pretty much it for the Reich, along with the gazillion Russian soldiers strolling westward.

Speer, I believe, said after the war that he couldn't believe his good luck that we took so long to focus on oil instead of cities.

283: Possibly. But I don't get the impression than WWII was hugely more bad in Europe than WWI. A little bigger, a little worse, but not really qualitatively different.

Leafing through Lindqvist at the moment; here's an apt bit concering Giulio Douhet, early proponent of aerial bombing:

On Valentine's Day, 1930, General Douhet quietly passed away while dozing in his rose garden. But he first managed to publish his last will and testament:

"People weep to hear of a few women and children killed in an air raid but are unmoved to hear of thousands of soldiers killed in action. All human lives are equally valuable; but ... a soldier, a robust young man should be considered to have the maximum individual value in the general economy of humanity."

284: Sure. And had Hitler kept attacking the RAF airfields instead of bombing London, things could have turned out very differently as well. Or if the Japanese had actually cared about anti-submarine warfare, or any number of things.

a soldier, a robust young man should be considered to have the maximum individual value in the general economy of humanity

See, I just knew there was a way to blame Hiroshima on the queers! Has James Dobson seen this book?

280, okay about the reviewer. But it's still a poor summary. Dresden had the Zeiss factory, made airplane parts, gas masks, and employed some thousands of people in those industries. Granting Bomber Harris was a nasty piece of work: it wasn't just his idea to bomb it, it was a USAAF / RAF project that identified legitimate -- insofar as bombing is ever legitimate, and we can argue that point -- reasons to bomb Dresden.

And yes, Neillands is given to Blimpishly saying, "there was a war on," and so forth. But the details are good. And I don't think his version of the story differs wildly from Frederick Taylor's, in Dresden.

The thing is, in a total war with entire mobilization of the population, almost any city becomes a legitimate target. And bombing a city, whether with 1945 bombs or with 2007 bombs, you're always going to drop some bombs that miss their targets. The real difference between Dresden and Coventry is success. The real difference between Dresden and Tokyo on the one hand, and Hiroshima on the other, as I said in 222, is that with the atomic bomb you lose the ability even to pretend that civilian casualties result from missing.

285: Pretty damn different.

Katherine, I will cop to being glib about a serious subject. War is a waste, and the horrors can not be described by one as ineloquent as I. Our industrial capacity to destroy is awful and terrible in both the eighteenth century meanings as well as modern. And we are certainly lucky in the US, for we have a "sucks to be you" view of war because it has mostly been fought somewhere else. But I also think that part of the reason we have spent a great deal of money on our military is for deterence, which hasn't worked out as we had planned re 9/11.

288: wow, that last bit is pretty inept.

Speer, I believe, said after the war that he couldn't believe his good luck that we took so long to focus on oil instead of cities.

Speer also said that the Hamburg firestorm "put the fear of God into me" and that more of them in 1943-4 would also have ended the war, which sounds like two contradictory assessments.

if you aren't willing to start chucking nukes around (as well you shouldn't be!)

Bah, just when I thought you were going to abandon wimpy political correctness and come out forthrightly in favor of nuclear annihilation, you wimp out.

285: probably depends on the country. Eastern Europe got really, really thoroughly brutalized in WW2.

289: "The thing is, in a total war with entire mobilization of the population, almost any city becomes a legitimate target"

If you're talking about as a matter of int'l humanitarian law--nope.

The real difference between Dresden and Tokyo on the one hand, and Hiroshima on the other, as I said in 222, is that with the atomic bomb you lose the ability even to pretend that civilian casualties result from missing.

My sense is that this is missing from Dresden and Tokyo as well. And maybe Hamburg too.

Speer, I believe, said after the war that he couldn't believe his good luck that we took so long to focus on oil instead of cities.

meet

Don't forget the revenge angle. Many people were really, really upset about Pearl Harbor, and figure that the Japanese had it coming.

291: And I always thought a big part of the money recently spent on military was best attributed to special interests. Who knew?

295 -- Katherine, I'm not talking about international humanitarian law, as I tried to make clear in 222. I'm trying to reason from the perspective of the Allied leaders in WWII. Maybe that's only so much historical fabulism, but it seems to me the best way to figure out why they did what they did.

My sense is that this is missing from Dresden and Tokyo as well. And maybe Hamburg too.

My sense is that, among military commanders and maybe civilian leaders, the ability to pretend was missing, but that for public consumption, the pretense was essential. And also for the likes of Truman, when dealing with their own consciences.

The thing is, in a total war with entire mobilization of the population, almost any city becomes a legitimate target.

See, that's the issue -- there is no such thing as "entire mobilization of the population." It's a fiction invented to justify murdering men, women, and children indiscriminately.

In Douhet's defense, btw, it makes perfect sense for an Italian to seek some means of winning a war other than the superiority of one's own ground forces to those of the enemy ...

295: fair enough.

I agree that at a 45 year old industrialist in Dresden who's a proud member of the Nazi party & is profiting off the war is, as far as individual culpability, a far more deserving target than a pimply faced 18 year old conscript who has to fight or risk death. But what about a 7 year old, or a pregnant women who doesn't have the right to vote & doesn't work in a factory, or a senile old man who hates the government? If you want to get the industrialist, bomb his factories.

There's something about air power that makes this more palatable to people, & it was a brand new possibility then--the atomic bomb of course, was even more brand spanking new. I wonder if we'd be equally likely to defend a policy of sending our soldiers to go into every house in a city & shoot all the inhabitants, no matter what. I wonder if Truman, Churchill or Roosevelt would've given the order. I doubt it. Because the house by house thing would almost certainly involve specific cases where the "total war makes everyone a legitimate target" argument would break down.

On one level, we're in no position to judge six decades later, and they were facing a threat on the scale that we've never had to. On another--Truman did not have access to the level of specific information we now have about exactly what the atomic bomb does to people.

302: This is exactly the problem with air strikes -- it dehumanizes the actions, making it easier to accept. I'm sure this is what drives the nonsensical claims of `minimizing civilian casualties' in current (US, anyway) bombing strategies. Expense and effort is taken to provide scientifically fairly meaningless numbers whose essential role seems to be making people feel better about what they are doing.

there is no such thing as "entire mobilization of the population." It's a fiction invented to justify murdering men, women, and children indiscriminately.

I'm not sure this is true. You got an industrial war that entails the dropping of thousands of pounds of bombs, the manufacture of thousands of airplanes, hundreds of ships, shells, bullets; uniforms, boots, jeeps -- armies of millions of men, thousands of machines, all requiring the constant support of the home front.

Manufacturing goes on in industrial centers, which are less euphemistically known as cities. No city is untouched by mobilization for war.

Which is why almost any city can be justified as a target. Do they make tires? refine oil? precision lenses? Once a city becomes a target, it's inevitable that you're going to have civilian casualties.

I reiterate 222.6; I also think the only alternative to killing civilians in bombing campaigns in WWII was not to have bombing campaigns. And to advise that would also have seemed immoral.

I remember reading somewhere about tactics for house-to-house fighting in Germany late in the war. At least in that account, you didn't go up the street, you blew a hole in the wall of the first house on the street, cleared it, and then proceeded to work your way from house to house by blowing holes through the walls and going in that way. It was too dangerous in the street. Any civilian who was still in those houses would have been in deep trouble.

305 to 302.

Arguably WWII was bad enough to deter a repeat even if the atomic bombs hadn't been dropped.

I thought the same thing about Jaws II, but.

Seriously, if you look at how seriously both sides of the Cold War agitated for hot war during the 50s & 60s, I don't see how you can argue that, without the threat of nuclear annihilation, we wouldn't have had a real war with the Soviet Union in Europe.

302, 303 -- I think we're all saying much the same thing, we're just coming to different conclusions.

I didn't say -- I hope I didn't say -- anyone is a target; rather, any city is a target -- because they all manufacture war material. Go to bomb any city, you will kill innocent bystanders. The perfect bomb has not, even in this era of laser-guided smart bombs, been invented.

So do you then advise no bombing at all? But this too will seem immoral.

307: It might have been in Canada.....

I think this thread demonstrates conclusively why comparisons to WWII should be banned from all public policy discussion. It just loads the dice in a ridiculous fashion--here we are discussing the annihilation of hundreds of thousands of civilians and plausible arguments are made in favor of it because the axis powers just really were that evil. The scale and inhumanity of Hitler and Tojo make World War II the ticking time bomb of war analogies.

310: Only a Nazi would say that.

Artillery of all sorts causes the most casualties in war. Relatively few casualties occur from direct fire weapons (rifles, machine guns). Bombing is just one form of artillery, but don't tell Idealist.

310. I'm explicitly abjuring comparisons to the present. (see 222.6 again) I'm just trying to reason through WWII.

You could make similar arguments about Sherman in Georgia, if you like. Do you think the march to the sea was justified? What about the evacuation and burning of Atlanta? or the burning of Columbia, SC?

And so, once again, we come to my conclusion that, to an enemy, there being no such thing as a civilian in a modern industrialized state. There are just targets, some worth more than others.

Slolernr, the thread is probably close to the "did too/did not" point, but I'll venture one more response:

(1) A tire factory is a legitimate military target; burning down the surrounding 10 square miles to get the tire factory, however, is disproportionate and criminal.

(2) The "entire population" is never mobilized. Infants, old people, people not employed in war-related industries, just to take the most obvious examples.

(3) The issue isn't "killing civilians" vs. "not killing civilians." Civilians are always killed in wars, which is one reason why wars are terrible and should only be fought where absolutely necessary. The issue is "deliberately setting out to kill thousands of civilians" vs. "accidentally killing scores or hundreds of civilians despite a good-faith effort to attack only legitimate targets."

(4) It is not open to debate that Arthur Harris and Curtis LeMay, and their superiors, ordered or tolerated the terror bombing of entire cities for the primary purpose of killing lots and lots of civilians, in the hopes that this would "break the enemy's morale" or somesuch.

307.2: Not convinced, and it's worth noting that nuclear weapons were not unequivocally a force for peace. "Nuke them before they nuke us" was in there somewhere in the hardliners' thinking. A USSR without nuclear weapons would have been a much smaller threat to the US.

My proposal doesn't just apply to Hitler. In fact, in terms of horrific public policy consequences, I think the time-honored tradition of constantly envisioning America as circa 1942 death struggle with evil is a lot more dangerous than the odd Godwins violation.

I mean, just look at the influx of world war II themed media and games post 9/11. Its fun to imagine yourself and your country as moral righteousness, straight backed and resplendent.

317, see 248 and other comments in that neighborhood.

315, Anderson, I don't see that we disagree on anything substantial, except perhaps the value of the Neillands book.

The present discussion is not without some relevance to current events, of course:

About halfway in he's asked what the correct British response should have been to the kidnapping of their sailors. Podhoretz responds that "they should have threatened to bomb the Iranians to smithereens."

So long as we don't recognize that we committed war crimes in WW2, it will be acceptable for people to argue that we repeat those crimes.

318, ooh, good chafe. Missed those on the first skim.

319: Glad to hear it. Today Unfogged, tomorrow the world!

So long as we don't recognize that we committed war crimes in WW2, it will be acceptable for people to argue that we repeat those crimes.

Somehow I'm thinking that "that's a war crime, just like the ones we committed in WWII" isn't the most helpful way for our side to frame the issue.

317. Its fun to imagine yourself and your country as moral righteousness, straight backed and resplendent.

Who was it that said that you have to remember that the "good guys" in WWII were a world empire, a totalitarian government and an apartheid state (Jim Crow).

310 is an interesting point, except that, unlike the ticking time bomb, WW2 actually happened. When people are arguing that we should fight every war with self-imposed restrictions (since, as 304 argues I think correctly, if you can't bomb anyplace where civilians are, then you can't bomb anything but armies in the field), then that makes others wonder how that applies to a total war, such as has been experienced in living memory.

I'm not strongly on either side here, but it's not clear to me how the restrictions are supposed to work. Since the US Civil War, old-fashioned military action that was limited to designated (and usually small) armed forces facing each other across semi-open fields has been obsolete (like Redcoats marching up Breed's Hill in good battle order, and getting slaughtered).

So nuking Edo is out - makes sense. Firebombing Hamburg, also out. What about "regular" bombs on steel plants near Pittsburgh? They were certainly vital to the war effort, and the stupendous material advantage that helped us win. Would it be sane for the Japanese or Germans not to try to destroy our steel plants if they could have? It certainly was not believed in 1942 that bombing industrial plants was only marginally effective. But, obviously, that would also have killed tens of thousands of civilians per factory. So that's out. Well, what about artillery bombardment? You're probably not going to hit only soldiers and unoccupied bridges with that. Et cetera.

I'm really not trying to be facetious. I agree that "you're not allowed to kill civilians." But when - as for the Poles, say - the result of losing the war is enslavement and near-genocide, where is that line supposed to be?

[I see on preview that 314 suggests a line, but I'm not sure speaks for everyone on that side of the discussion, so I'm posting anyway]

Or, rather, 315.

Preview, indeed.

You could make similar arguments about Sherman in Georgia, if you like

Some quotes from the General, most of which are suitable to the discussion
http://thinkexist.com/quotation/war_is_hell/206888.html

324: lots of fantasy constructions may be fun, but rarely lead to accurate evaluation of reality...

Slol, to follow up on 315.3, my point about Dresden, Tokyo, and Hamburg is that, iirc, the selection of ordnance and of targets was designed to annihiliate civilians, not merely to strike militarily legitimate targets. It fits comfortably within 18 U.S.C. 2331(1)(B), anyway.

I'm especially struck by the notion that Hiroshima was fair revenge for Pearl Harbor in this regard. (Not your point, I know) As if the Japanese had tried to kill all the civilians in Honolulu or something.

316: Oh, I know that lots of people - including US generals - wanted to drop the Bomb. My point is that they didn't, and I ascribe that almost entirely to fear of the Bomb. I simply don't see other, sufficient reasons that the US and USSR went 40 hate-filled years without a direct shot between them. Certainly it wasn't lack of heated rhetoric and hateful propoganda that created millions who hungered for such a war.

330: I'm not getting you. I took your original argument to be that there would have been a war with the Soviets in Europe but for the existence of the nuclear deterrent. My point was that a world without a nuclear deterrent would also have been a world in which the Soviets would have been a much smaller threat to the U.S., and that the existence of a Soviet nuclear threat was a major driver driver of all that heated rhetoric and hateful propaganda.

325 does not seem to me like it actually engages with what people find so upsetting about the WW2 bombings. It's not just that a lot of civilians died as "collateral damage" in an attack on an industrial target; it was the deliberate targetting of civilian population centers in order to break the will of our enemies, which is *precisely* what we say makes the World Trade Center bombings so horrific & so much worse than actions of ours that have actually led to more deaths. So the part where you start talking about steel plants & artillery seems unresponsive.

315.3, 329: You're absolutely right that the Air Force was consciously making decisions that would kill primarily civilians. But also bear in mind that dropping conventional bombs on factories wasn't doing the trick. I don't think that, for most of the decision-makers, the thinking was "I'm bored with legitimate military targets - let's burn some [ethnic slur]s!" It was more "Our current bombing isn't doing it - the factories are back to work within days. What would be more destructive?"

I mean, it turns out that you're better off without heavy bombers - they're expensive and ineffective - but once they're invented, they get put to bad uses. After Conventry, the Allies weren't going to settle for super-careful targeting of factories (I don't mean "they started it!" - I mean that, inevitably, someone's going to kill a lot of civilians with bombers, and the door is open to that activity).

it was the deliberate targetting of civilian population centers in order to break the will of our enemies, which is *precisely* what we say makes the World Trade Center bombings so horrific

Except for the not being at war part, which makes 9/11 more like Pearl Harbor than Dresden.

331: I thought the consensus from the end of WW2 through at least the 70's was, absent the US and the nukes, the Soviets could take Europe any time it wanted to.

333: `consciously making decisions that would primarily civilians' is hedging language. `deciding to kill civilians' as a tactic is not quite the same thing. In some of the cases talked about here, there was no fig leaf of `military targets'. The primary goal was the destruction of property and civilians, period, afaics.

332: My point - and I probably got distracted in writing it - is that sending a thousand bombers over Homestead, PA (which I use because it was our biggest steel plant, and I know how it was laid out) would, in fact, kill tens of thousands of civilians. The mill was across the street from rowhouses. The farthest house in town was maybe a mile from the plant - you think night bombing was that accurate?

At least some of the towns that were firebombed were just as legitimate targets as Homestead was. So is it simply the ordinance that's a problem? TNT ok, napalm and nukes bad? What percentage of the civilian population is acceptable as being "collateral" as opposed to targeted? IOW, if I use TNT to bomb a steel plant smack dab in a residential district, and kill 25,000 civilians, is that really on the other side of a bright moral line from using napalm on the same location to kill 35,000?

"Our current bombing isn't doing it - the factories are back to work within days. What would be more destructive?"

Yep. Kind of like we're not getting anywhere attacking the near enemy, and should take the fight to the far enemy, as others have noted.

334: This makes no sense on two fronts. Firstly whatever else it was, the attack on Pearl Harbor was a military target aimed at reducing US naval capacity and 9/11 was an attack on a civilian target aiming at terrorizing. Secondly, in so much as it makes sense to talk about being `at war' with the architects of the WTC bombers, their intentions had been made clear for years.

336: I hedged because we're also talking about 'military targets.' Obviously fire-bombing a city with no war industry is a war crime. What I'm trying to get at is: Is it a war crime to fire-bomb a city with a real industry? Hence, 337.

334: our enemies would argue that we've been at war for years. I don't quite agree, but the Bush administration seems to judging by the number of "enemy combatants" being held for things they did years before 9/11. And we'd tried to kill Bin Laden before that date.

In any case that is simply not the *primary* moral objection. Are you claiming that, now that we've invaded Iraq, we'd say, "well, war is hell" if an Iraqi citizen killed 10,000 Americans in a terrorist attack? We don't talk so much about who started the war anymore, or how aggression is a war crime--that's another one of those arguments that got dropped when it got embarrassing.

(In the 40s, 50s, and 60s, we did take it more seriously--there are a bunch of great Truman & Eisenhower quotes about preventive war, & a wonderfully awkward moment during the Cuban missile crisis when RFK talks about not wanting his brother to go down in history as the American Tojo).

But also bear in mind that dropping conventional bombs on factories wasn't doing the trick.

It wasn't seriously tried. The Brits got creamed when they tried precision daylight bombing, b/c they were wrong that bombers could defend themselves against fighters. The correct response, which the U.S. achieved, was to build a P-51 that could fly to Berlin and back.

But again, look at a book like Bomber Command by Hastings (no lily-livered liberal, he), which makes it clear that terror bombing was the purpose of Bomber Command, but that it had to conceal that purpose from the public.

So the Brits didn't care to waste time & money on precision bombing -- it wasn't where the RAF's heart was in the first place.

There's been an increasing willingness to target civilians since the Civil War or so. This is pretty much regardless of who the players were, since each escalation on any side is usually met by an escalation by its enemies.

This reached a local maximum in WWII, when all three sides showed extreme brutality. The Cold War was a standoff motivated by deterrence predicated on a common willingness to kill tens of millions of people. It worked fairly well.

In 1990 or so the Cold War was over, and the killing machines started looking for a new target. In 2001 they found one.

At this point, people are using the worst things done in WWII as the standard of acceptability. They feel no need to actually make the case that the situation today is comparable to 1943 or 1944. Bombing civilians has become normal.

335: "Could have" and "would have" are very different claims. It's also reasonable to assume that postwar conventional force structures in Europe would have developed differently in a nuke-free world.

337: the conventional answer to the question about acceptable number of civilians deaths is "as few as its possible to kill in the course of destroying the military target that you need to destroy." You can certainly come up with close cases & get into big fights about what that means in practice, but in WW2, as a matter of historical fact, we were not pursuing a policy of "as few civilian deaths as possible."

I'm not sure that the first part of 342 in any way disputes what it's responding to. My point was that, for whatever reason(s), using heavy bombers to precisely and permanently eliminate industrial capacity didn't work. So, even without bloodthirstiness, something else was going to be tried. Again, see the close of my 333.

339. I agree with you that Pearl Harbor was a military target, and the Al Queda had been attacking us for years, whether or not we were willing to acknowledge it. But I was trying to differentiate between actions taken during a war and actions taken to either start or futher a "war". I am comfortable with thinking that 9/11 is a larger atrocity than Hiroshima, pace the loss of life.

344: With conventional forces, it would have been virtually impossible for NATO to protect Western Europe. The USSR's staggeringly large population (which it had no problem sending in as cannon fodder) plus decent industrial capacity simply surpassed any realistic force NATO could have had more or less permanently in place.

But anyway, I'm not trying to play Tom Clancy here. Maybe Stalin and Kruschev look at a hostile yet virtually defenseless Western Europe and shrug. But, given Europe's history of war, I think that the logical presumption is that, in the course of 40 years, hostile European powers will find a way to fight one another (in Europe). If they don't, then that needs to be explained. I explain it by MAD. What's your explanation?

I am comfortable with thinking that 9/11 is a larger atrocity than Hiroshima

"pace" or not, I'm getting the hell out of the way of this.

The starting point for this discussion was the idea that after losing 20 million people in a conventional war it might not look like a great idea to start another one. And Stalin didn't go looking for WWII, for that matter.

There's been an increasing willingness to target civilians since the Civil War or so.

When was there ever not a willingness to target civilians? The means to do it en masse have certainly expanded, but it's not like there weren't atrocities in every damn war since the dawn of time.

344: Without the nukes, it's almost realistic to think of everyone in Western Europe heading for Dunkirk again right after the fall of Germany. What was left to stop the Soviets?

Yeesh. The tag should have closed after "not."

"There's been an increasing willingness to target civilians since the Civil War or so."

As compared to what baseline? I'm pretty sure its just technology making the same old barbarism that much more effective.

When was there ever not a willingness to target civilians?
Relatively brief period of European history- @ 1600- 1900. Not that civilians didn't suffer. An army marches on its stomach, and all that.

I am late to a thread I would usually be enthusiasticaly engaged with, but if we are talking about aerial bombing and war crimes I keep repeating that the conventions make a strong distinction about bombing in occupied territory versus bombing enemy territory. We cannot sanely consider Baquba or Tikrit "enemy territory", bomb it, pacify it, withdraw the Marines to FOBs or Baghdad, and then return in a few months to bomb again. The conventions attempt to ensure a large permanent resident garrison.

Iraq is a complete catalogue of war crimes.

355: Yes, bad things have always happened. That does not, however, justify them.

Maybe Stalin and Kruschev look at a hostile yet virtually defenseless Western Europe and shrug.

I don't think the Soviets were in any position to take on NATO for some time after the war, nukes or not. Despite their remarkable resurgence during the war, the Soviet Union was in a bad way after the Germans trashed the place.

OTOH, I would not have been terribly comfortable basing NATO policy on such a hunch.

Recall that the term "overkill" was coined re: making sure that one destroyed, say, Kiev with a nuke just big enough for the job, and didn't waste any megatons better applied elsewhere. Brrrrrr.

I think people would be better served by understanding that modern war is evil, rather than coming up with elaborate consequentialist justifications for the evil. We were wrong and murderous many times in WWII, one can argue it was a situation where there were a multitude of good excuses for being wrong and murderous, but that still does not make our actions very ethical.

Let's not even try to get pure intellectual consistency here. It is just too problematic to even start down the road of coming up with cases where it is acceptable though unfortunate to kill a few hundred thousand innocent people. In a nuclear era, a few hundred thousand acceptable casualties become a few million, then a few hundred million. This "moral" calculus was very evident during the Cold War. We were very lucky that mutual assured destruction "worked" for several decades during the Cold War. But that mentality is too dangerous to continue indefinitely.

Basically, we need to focus harder on the truths that war is wrong and killing innocents is wrong, and focus less on the casuistry of excuses for such actions. Forget the myth of WWII as the "good war"; there are no "good wars" any more. If we fully understand that, we will have better luck avoiding future wars.

357: But it does argue against the hypothesis that we can effectively conduct war without warcrimes. Which, contra bloodthirsty conservatives, is an argument for not starting wars, rather than engaging in butchery and barbarism.

352: The US and British armies? IIRC Patton made the same sort of argument in favor of continuing east in 1945.

And again, the question isn't whether the Soviets could have won a war in Europe, it's whether they would have seen it as in their interests to start one. They beat the Germans in the east, but they absolutely got the ever-loving shit kicked out of them in the course of doing so. Why would they have wanted to keep fighting?

"It's always been that way" is certainly a satisfying way of seeming to end any argument, but it's a stupid thing to say unless you have a detailed knowledge of what's in question. This is a historical question and unfortunately I can't argue the details. I believe that there have been periods when wars were fought between professional armies and massacre and scorched-earth policies were not the preferred methods.

What may have changed is the technical ability to massacre from a distance without seeing what you're doing, and while pretending that you don't even know. The Mongol armies were capable of killing entire cities one at a time with swords, and in several places they did just that. However, my suggestion that Genghis Khan be taken as a model for the American global strategy has not been picked up by the neocons yet.

355: I'd revise that--30 Year War? The 98? Heck, anything involving colonialism.

"one at a time" => "one person at a time"

However, my suggestion that Genghis Khan be taken as a model for the American global strategy has not been picked up by the neocons yet.

I though Reynolds was on record that the brown people need to get it through their little brown brains that if they don't shape up we'll eventually be forced to kill them all. It will be all their fault when we do, of course.

Forget the myth of WWII as the "good war"; there are no "good wars" any more. If we fully understand that, we will have better luck avoiding future wars.

But it does argue against the hypothesis that we can effectively conduct war without warcrimes. Which, contra bloodthirsty conservatives, is an argument for not starting wars, rather than engaging in butchery and barbarism.

Which is why, contrary to all logic, I think that the Geneva Conventions are not a universal good. Ther are no good wars, only wars that are less bad, and only if you "win". As Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler said, war is a racket.
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

362--I don't disagree with your larger point, John, I just don't think that we need hark back to some earlier time when we were not so coarse to decry our current state of being, especially when that time never really existed.

366: right, the lesson of WWII is that even the "best" and most "justified" large-scale modern war will lead to horrific war crimes and massive destruction, even by the "more moral" side.

I think something like this lesson was absorbed by the combatants immediately post-WWII, hence the lack of direct conflict between the U.S. and Russia and the achievement of intra-European peace.

363. Yeah, i was going for Peace of Westphalia through start of WWI, but obviously there are gaps and exceptions. As for colonial wars, forget it, that was all about wog bashing.

I think something like this lesson was absorbed by the combatants immediately post-WWII, hence the lack of direct conflict between the U.S. and Russia and the achievement of intra-European peace.

And yet this very same feeling arising out of WWI was arguably the cause of WWII, by appeasing Hitlers demands to avoid another war.

"I think something like this lesson was absorbed by the combatants immediately post-WWII, hence the lack of direct conflict between the U.S. and Russia and the achievement of intra-European peace."

I'd be more likely to attribute this to, at first, complete U.S. strategic dominance and then later the "stabilizing" effects of MAD.

Max Sawicky's uber-progressive principles for foreign policy discussion;just posted

"1. There is no 'we.' Never was. Policy is of, by, and for elites." ...Max

Or, as I so frequently say:1st step is alienation.

At this point, WWII tactics have been normalized and are being proposed in the absence of a serious threat.

I have no clear idea whether the hawks really believe that Saddam and Ahmadinejad are comparable to Hitler, or whether they just realize that Americans won't support starting a costly war for world conquest just "because we can".

I believe that there have been periods when wars were fought between professional armies and massacre and scorched-earth policies were not the preferred methods.

I've stayed out of this thread mostly, because I am hardly an expert on WWII, but I don't think this is right. Or at least I can't think of a handy example. There have been times when the rules of warfare protected the nobility from each other, or when certain weapons were considered bad form. But that wasn't a general belief about civilians. It's just sometimes only been acceptable to rape and murder the poor people instead of everyone in the city. Or the people you're colonizing.

I can't imagine being Truman and having to decide whether to drop the bomb and remove the fiction that civilians weren't the real targets of war, or whether to refrain from dropping the bomb and waging a bloody campaign to take the Japanese mainland. War crime? At some point I'm not sure the concept is coherent. Would Hiroshima seem any less horrifying if we believed it had been necessary? Do you feel better knowing we leafletted the city first? Do we feel better about Dresden if we believe the Allied commanders' hearts were in the right place?

If history teaches us anything, it teaches that being in a war means chances are whoever is in charge will have to make a horrible decision. Far from excusing the leaders, it seems to iindict them, especially if the war is one that did not need to be fought.

it does argue against the hypothesis that we can effectively conduct war without warcrimes. Which, contra bloodthirsty conservatives, is an argument for not starting wars, rather than engaging in butchery and barbarism.

Which is why, contrary to all logic, I think that the Geneva Conventions are not a universal good.

This makes no sense. The fact that people are always going to commit murder isn't a good argument that laws against killing aren't good things to have.

Crap, second bit should be in italics too. That wasn't me that said that; it was TLL, the bloodthirsty leech.

For one example, in certain sorts of territorial wars the peasantry were required to cultivate the land, which was useless if depopulated.

Civilians have never been exempt from attack, but we're talking about policies of killing as many civilians as possible.

In 1689 the French destroyed virtually all of the German castles along the Rhein. The actual residents were left fairly untouched, as the goal of the French was, in part, to make these residents Frenchmen. It was elites vs. elites.

To pretend that whatever rapes and murders occurred in that context shed any light on Hiroshima is ridiculous. War has never been "good" or harmless to civilians, but that doesn't make the effects of aerial bombing somehow typical of all wars throughout time.

Weird position-shifting going on here. I see the same people who argue that Truman was a war criminal (or next to it) arguing that all wars target and devastate civilian populations. In which case Truman would be no more a war criminal than every warrior ever to live.

JRoth: there are no war crimes without international law.

If murder's not illegal, then killing your neighbor isn't a crime.

The Hague Convention created/recognized laws of war, as did the Geneva Conventions. The U.S. signed those treaties (leaving aside whether it would be bound regardless -- *I* didn't vote for any law against murder, but that's not a defense if I kill my neighbor).

This thread:
64% WWII
33% Scalia
1% Ephebophilia
2% Other

this thread: 100% bummer.

Apostropher plans to campaign for Unfogged Overlord on a "More Ephebophilia" platform, methinks.

Michael Bloomberg will be my running mate.

372: I like this of Max's, and provides a corrective to what I can't go along with in Digby's speech, or Hilzoy's Memorial Day "We are a better country than that..."

I know why and what is being said, for certain values of "we," and always like the people who say it, but I don't find it useful anymore.

To pretend that whatever rapes and murders occurred in that context shed any light on Hiroshima is ridiculous. War has never been "good" or harmless to civilians, but that doesn't make the effects of aerial bombing somehow typical of all wars throughout time.

No, but I think all it means is that we're better at killing greater people in greater numbers, not that there was a past in which harming civilians was beyond the pale. Ex recto, I think that part of the problem, if you can call it that, is that aerial bombing doesn't require actually seeing or thinking about the people you're killing.

I know why and what is being said, for certain values of "we," and always like the people who say it, but I don't find it useful anymore.

I don't find it *believable* any more, but I still think it's useful; rhetorically, it places the dissenter in the position of arguing that he's an outsider to the group. That's why the argument is usually about who "we" really is -- "we don't believe in torture"; "ah, but this poll says we *do* believe in torture"; etc.

The classic example, I think, is Lenin's brazen designation of his minority faction as the Bolsheviks, i.e. the "majority," and the majority as the minority -- the "Mensheviks." Lenin would've eaten Karl Rove for lunch.

And here I thought they were Mensheviks because they were such mensches. So you're saying that Falwell's Moral Majority was directly inspired by Lenin, eh?

So you're saying that Falwell's Moral Majority was directly inspired by Lenin, eh?

I'm confident that they are at this moment exchanging whatever yuks they can over that very issue.