There is neither a good war nor a bad peace...
...Any war is the war
Hello kit and welcome to the forum !
You may not know this, but this thread was started from, shall we say misguided interpretations regarding US Military intentions. You will more than likely meet him/her herein. You two will get along fine - It's right up your alley :D
I suppose since we're right next door, we could just remove any and all ethics and morality in the decision-making process and just bomb the piss outa all of them :wry:
That would go over real well at home, and we would no longer have to worry about support from our buds in Europe - there will no longer be any.
I'd like to think the US Military has come a long way since WWII, and we have a strategy besides blanketing Iran in nukes.
Regards, Stan
Quote:
Originally Posted by
kit
We may not be doing that now, but we have in the past. There wasn't much military justification for unleashing our fire-bomb raids on Japan (unlike Germany where we attempted "pin-point" bombing of military targets), but the case could be made that such deliberate targeting of civilians went a long way toward convincing the Japanese to surrender.
Perhaps it's a tactic we should reconsider in this war. Not in Iraq, but against those regimes we know support jihadism and oppose us, such as Iran.
With Pitchforks and Sharpened Sticks Will They Fight..
One rationale aside from destroying the cottage industry aspect of Japanese civilians was the fear that a massive invasion would result in civilians using any and all means to attack US forces, thus forcing our troops to kill thousands of women and kids bearing sharpened sticks. Better to fry them from the air than to shoot them on the ground was the motto in some quarters - less PTSD for sevearl hundred pilots killing from 10,000 feet than say 400,000 front line troops having to shoot women with sharpenedsticks. It was believed the Japanese military could have exerted enough influence on the Divine Emperor that he would have issued an edict commanding civilians to fight the Americans to the death when they invaded.
It might interest Sarajevo to know that I'm researching the Tattler archives looking for the source and expose' of the American plan to carpet bomb all of Kosovo during that episode of our history. The rationale behind this secret plan that never came to fruition was this: if we carpet bombed all of Kosovo, the Serbs wouldn't have to fight there and we then in turn wouldn't have to fight them. I won't take up any posting space when I find that reference, I'll just PM it.