| I like this take because it helps me contextualize the conflict in terms of other conflicts. Specifically, it has a very similar structure to "the US could have won in Vietnam if they'd just used nuclear weapons". It's less often applied to the US destruction of Korea because the US did, in fact, run out of things to bomb. However, there were elements in the US military who were very upset that they couldn't use nukes there. In retrospect, the wholesale slaughter of, say, the peasantry of south Vietnam is a horrific crime, and the fact that more folks weren't murdered doesn't do much to make me feel like it was a moral thing to do. From a US perspective, that take has been pretty persuasive, but even a cursory look at what the US did to the people of that country is chilling. The fact that they could have simply immolated everyone in the country doesn't make it one bit less of a crime. The fact that Nazi Germany "only" killed 13M civilians in camps (and didn't just, say, summarily execute them on the street, but instead simply legally deported an excess non-citizen population, until they had no place to put any more "surplus" non-citizens) doesn't make me feel any better about what they did in order to ensure a "German" majority in their nation. I can say for sure, as I drove between the Ute and Dine "reservations" to my parent's home near a Mescalero reservation, that the fact that there are still remnants of those folks living here doesn't do a lot to make me feel better about their treatment in the past. I suppose that the US could have done even more horrific things, but I'm thoroughly mystified how that would make any of this horror less terrible. All those actions still feel like horrifying crimes against humanity, and the fact that the people who did them could have been even more destructive and cruel doesn't do much to change my opinions on any of them. I'd bet that the justification will probably sound just as convincing to the IDF and related folks when they run out of folks to murder. The idea that we could have done worse is often a fantastic consolation for guilty people. |