[rwallace]

If the author had portrayed the Imperial Japanese government as an innocent victim, I would be the first to despise the article. But he didn't. He mentioned the campaign of mass murder in China, the insane stupidity of the decision to attack Pearl Harbor and then to fight the war to the bitter end. In no way does he suggest any of these things are excusable. The people he portrays as innocent victims are the civilians of every nationality who are burned to death in bombing raids or starved by blockades - 'economic sanctions' if you want to use the current euphemism.

And he's right. The economic sanctions against Iraq that condemned hundreds of thousands of children to starve to death were an atrocity just about exactly as bad as the rape of Nanking. Just about exactly as inexcusable. We need to get to the point where we stop looking for excuses for such actions.

[smegel]

> Nobody is more familiar with what a curse airplanes can be when deployed for evil than the Japanese. Airplanes dropped the canisters that burned their cities, the mines that starved their children, and the nukes that instantly made vast irradiated graveyards out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — for the first time in history visiting solar-temperature hell upon human habitations, and hinting at mankind’s full capacity for suicidal madness. But their intimate familiarity with the “cursed dream” of airplanes also stems from the Japanese state’s own misuse of the great invention for its imperial dreams.

So the bombing of Japan was "evil", Japan's own bombings were just a "misuse" in pursuit of a "dream". How very neutral.

> The economic sanctions against Iraq that condemned hundreds of thousands of children to starve to death were an atrocity just about exactly as bad as the rape of Nanking. Just about exactly as inexcusable. We need to get to the point where we stop looking for excuses for such actions.

Economic sanctions are an alternative to war. Are you suggesting we should have bombed Iraq instead at the time? Or just let Saddam do what he pleased? Ironically, when the USA does nothing (Rwanda, Pol Pot, North Korea, Srebrenica) they are accused of complicity in inaction, yet when they do something, they are war criminals. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

[rwallace]

> Economic sanctions are an alternative to war.

And frankly one of the reasons I think they should be taken off the table entirely is because they are far too easy an alternative. At least in war, some of the victims have their faces broadcast on television. The victims of economic sanctions are never heard of except as dry statistics.

> Are you suggesting we should have bombed Iraq instead at the time? Or just let Saddam do what he pleased?

Saddam had already been stopped from doing what he pleased. He had been comprehensively kicked out of Kuwait. It should have stopped there.

> Ironically, when the USA does nothing (Rwanda, Pol Pot, North Korea, Srebrenica) they are accused of complicity in inaction, yet when they do something, they are war criminals. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

This is only a contradiction if the two kinds of accusations come from the same people.

[pekk]

I would much rather be subjected to economic sanctions than bombed, but I guess I don't speak for everyone. Maybe some people prefer to be bombed.

[rwallace]

That's probably because you live in a relatively wealthy country that would not be harmed so much by economic sanctions. One way to look at it is that that the economic sanctions against Iraq killed two or three orders of magnitude more civilians than the bombing campaigns of 1991 and 2003 put together. Another way to look at it is that if you were starving to death because of economic sanctions, you would probably change your preference very quickly.

In any case, I wasn't proposing to spend twelve years bombing Iraq instead of the economic sanctions. I was proposing that after Saddam had been kicked out of Kuwait, that should have been the end of the matter.