Replies

It was total annihilation that broke the will of the enemy to continue the war, surrender, adopt democracy and join the free nations of the world. Unfortunately, that is not the way wars are fought today and look at what you get -- unending insurgencies.

In the 1950's and 60's there was a 'better dead than red' vs 'better red than dead' debate regarding possible war with Russia. A few years on some PBS program Robert McNamara said - and I wish I could quote him exactly - that if the U.S. were attacked with a nuclear weapon we should not necessarily react in kind. Any kind of resistance is evil...it is good to let evil win. Basically that's where this guy is coming from. Even if bombing civilian targets hadn't been done he would still find some crazy rationale to criticize the good guys, back then and I'm sure now also. Whatever his education, the bottom line is that in his heart he has made a choice to support the dark side of the human race.

It was total annihilation that broke the will of the enemy to continue the war, surrender, adopt democracy and join the free nations of the world. Unfortunately, that is not the way wars are fought today and look at what you get -- unending insurgencies.

We killed about 12% of Germany's population and about 2.5% of Japan's population during WWII. I think that was the key - most of the military age people who were raring to fight were killed off. The rest were content to submit to Allied rule after their surrender. But we also lost 400,000 dead. Which is why we were able to take the gloves off. In Iraq, after about 3 years of light-duty guerrilla war, we're up to 2,500 dead. I don't think that's enough to justify flattening Iraqi cities with conventional bombs. But if we had done so, I suspect we'd have a lot less guerrilla activity today.

Note that that this guerrilla war hasn't lasted very long by the standards of these things. One of the more successful campaigns run by the Brits - the Malayan Emergency - lasted a dozen years. And they were up against opposition - a ragtag bunch of self-trained Communist political cadres, really - armed primarily with old equipment looted from post-surrender (WWII) Japanese arsenals, whereas the core of the Iraqi resistance is composed of personnel from a half-million man army funded with billions from decades of oil revenues.