August 2, 2015

HOW MANY HAVE TO DIE FOR A MORAL CONFUSION:

How the Iran Deal Complicates Israel's Approach to Iran (James Carafano, August 02, 2015, Daily Signal)

Israel, like all nations, has the inherent right of self-defense. The crucial question is: How will Israeli choose to exercise that right?

The right of self-defense does not demand that a country wait until it is physically attacked before taking steps to protect itself. But there are rules--and they mark the difference between preventative war and pre-emptive action.

Preventative war is when a country strikes another first because it perceives a potential future threat. Early in the Cold War, there was serious debate in U.S. policy circles about launching a preventative nuclear strike on the Soviet Union--before Stalin had a chance to build up his nuclear arsenal. It never happened, partly because such action would have been unethical, immoral and illegal.

While preventative war is beyond the pale, pre-emptive war is not. If a nation believes that it is under threat, it has the inherent right to protect itself. That requires judiciously weighing two factors: intent and actions.

Hiroshima's fate, 70 years ago this week, must not be forgotten (Andrew Anthony, 8/02/15, The Guardian)

In numbers of people killed, the second world war is uncontested in its claim to be the most murderous six years in human history. About 60 million perished in a global conflagration of total warfare. But amid this remorseless carnival of death and destruction, two very different events stand out for their grotesque novelty and their coldly efficient slaughter of civilians: the Holocaust, the world's first industrialised genocide, and Hiroshima, the world's first atomic bomb attack, which took place on 6 August 1945, 70 years ago this week.

Both cast long shadows over the 20th century and on into the present day. And both raise complex questions about the nature of humanity - that we have within us the capability to organise over several years the systematic extermination of a whole race of people, and also the obliteration of a large populated city in the blink of an eye.


While there's a natural tendency to overstate the number of casualties--on both sides--that would have resulted from an Allied invasion of the home islands, it is indisputable that the atomic bombs saved Allied lives and you can pick your own number of how many Japanese would have been killed had the war been won by "conventional" means.  It seems fairly certain that continued fire-bombing (after all, those two cities had been saved for nukes so we could measure the results) and an assault would have killed some considerable portion of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki toll, if not more.

So we get a fairly simple question, not whether the atomic bombs were morally justified, but whether the war was. Do the world's democracies--chiefly England, America and our Anglospheric partners--have the right to replace undemocratic regimes, especially those involved in exterminating populations, their own and others.  

The past hundred years suggest that, despite some feeble demurs, we all agree that we have not only the right but the obligation.

So, having determined that the Axis regimes could not stand, atomic weapons ought only have been a part of the calculus of how to end them quickest and with the least deaths--our own and theirs. 

Their use inarguably ended the regime, irrepective of the possibility that it might have been ended by other even less destructive means. 

Now, Mr. Anthony expresses horror at the Holocaust, with its seven million dead, but let us also add the millions of others who died in Hitler's wars.  

So, here's a simple question, why would it have been morally wrong to use an atomic weapon--had they been developed sooner--to destroy a German city where the Nazi Party was rallying in the years before the Holocaust reached full swing and before we'd had to invade the Continent?  By what moral calculus could say 100,000 deaths in such a bombing not justify saving ten million and more?

Likewise, how many holocausts occured--in the USSR, China, Cambodia, Korea, Iraq, Syria, etc.--because we failed to strike Stalin's regime immediately upon developing nukes?  How many lives would have been saved had the second demonstration  bomb been dropped on Moscow instead of on Nagasaki?

If the calculus we're engaged in concerns only, or mainly, the costs in lives, then the great sin of the 20th century was not using the bomb, but failing to do so.

 

Posted by at August 2, 2015 7:59 AM
  

blog comments powered by Disqus
« HELPING THEM FORCE THE CONTRADICTIONS: | Main | SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER THAN TO SUCCUMB TO THE OIL CURSE: »