Genocide?

Snouck wrote me this morning and took me to task for having cited this post about our tactics in World War II, as an example of how to win a war. Snouck considered the post tantamount to calling for genocide.

It seems that I have made the error of not being clear and specific about my intentions in posting that article. So let me clarify, and hopefully with specificity. :)

I read that article as being specifically about how we won World War II. Of course, the purpose of the article is to point out that we are not using the real force of our military in our current struggles, and the implications is that this is why we are losing. I agree with this implication. For instance, when Moqtada al-Sadr and his gang were holed up in that Mosque in Ramallah, we should have hit the Mosque with however many missiles it would have taken to ensure that they were all dead.

Our reticence to use such force, and our bizarre PC-inspired prohibition against destroying a Mosque, even when war is being waged against us from the Mosque, is a clear example that we have lost the fighting spirit that won World War II.

Now, this is not to say that I believe we have to employ every tactic we used in World War II. I believe you fight the war which is in front of you, not the one that is buried in the past behing you. Thus far, in our current war, we have had no cause to use nuclear weapons, so I do not advocate nuking the Sunni Triangle or Teheran, or Damascus or any other city in the Islamic world.

I do buy the idea that in WWII, we were right to use nuclear weapons on Japan. In retrospect it may seem a foolish decision, but at the time it seemed the correct decision. The reason I think it was correct to use nukes, given what we knew then, is because we were facing a war with millions of casualties on mainland Japan. The way we went about winning only produced a couple hundred thousand casualties.

I think that after having used nukes, we came to understand the devastating consequences of such weapons. I don't think we really understood then. I don't mean simply the consequences of radiation. I mean the fact that we could quite literally kill almost every single living thing on Earth using such weapons.

I do not buy the idea that in a post-WWII world that we should use nuclear weapons for anything other than retaliation against the use of nukes against our country, or for the use of a bio-weapon (such as smallpox) against our country.

In other words, if hundreds of thousands of Americans die as the result of the use of one of these weapons, then I believe we would be justified to retaliate in kind. (Now, that does not mean I think we should use bio-weapons against another country. Bio-weapons are too uncontrolled. Nukes are somewhat more controllable.)

And, I do think the way to go about using nukes is to give ultimatums.

For instance, if Al Qaeda, or any shadowy terrorist organization, uses a nuke on us, it is not because they built a nuke. It is because either Pakistan, NoKo, Iran, Russia, or China provided them with a nuke. Therefore, those would be the countries we should focus on, if we were to be hit with a nuke.

Bio-weapons are, I imagine, much harder to trace.

I honestly don't know how we could respond in the case of the unleashing of a bio-weapon on the U.S.

By the way, I can't imagine that we would ever go head to head with Russia or China in a nuclear war. The consequences of such a war could very likely be the utter anihilation of all life on Earth.

I understand perfectly well why Snouck criticized me. Perhaps, I should have clarified all this. I know that I have written against the use of nukes on numerous occasions. I have even opposed the use of nuclear bunker busters (and what some call "tactical battle-field nukes) even though theoretically they would kill very few people.

I am against the use of nukes such as these because no matter how controlled we make them, they are still nukes, and our using them would give other regimes license to use whatever kind of nukes they could create, which are not likely to be as controlled as something we possibly could create.

I hope I have made myself clear.

Now, let me also say that I do believe that the lesson of the aforementioned article is that the way to win a war is to beat your enemy, and then beat him some more, and beat him and beat and beat, until he is so terrified of you that he cries for mercy, and then, unfortunately, you must hit one more time, very hard, so that he never forgets how terrible it is to be engaged in battle with you. He must become convinced beyond all pride that he would surely have lost everything if he does not give up and follow orders in the aftermath of the war.

The United States has won three wars in which we employed this tactic, and in the aftermath of each of those three wars, the life of the enemy completely changed, and where there had previously been slavery and oppression, there was freedom, free markets, and growth.

The three wars I refer to are our own American Civil War, and the wars against Japan and Germany. In the American Civil War, our Northern troops had the South all but beaten, and THEN Sherman went on his scorched Earth march through Atlanta. This convinced the Southerners that if they did not completely surrender to the North, they would have lost everything they held dear.

Similarly, in the wars against Japan and Germany we delivered coup de grace blows in the final days of the war. In Germany, the British Air Force firebombed Dresden. And, of course, in Japan, we dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

That's how you win a war, from what I can tell. Let me know what you think. I would love to think it can be done in a nicer way that this. Look forward to hearing from y'all.