Waterboarding And Hiroshima: Why We Must “Lower Ourselves To Our Enemy’s Level”
Wall Street Journal:
Did the Allies in World War II “lower themselves to the level of their enemies”?
The death last week of Paul Tibbets Jr., the pilot of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945, is an opportunity to revisit the debate about the strategic value and moral justification of the aerial bombardment of civilian targets in wartime. It also casts some light on the controversy surrounding Michael Mukasey’s nomination to be the next attorney general of the United States.
Judge Mukasey will likely only squeak into office after he refused to state that waterboarding (or simulated drowning) met the legal definition of torture. “As described, these techniques seem over the line on a personal basis, repugnant to me and would probably seem the same to many Americans,” he wrote in a letter to Sen. Pat Leahy and his colleagues on the Judiciary Committee. “But hypotheticals are different from real life and in any legal opinion the actual facts and circumstances are critical.” For his sin, Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and the rest of the Democratic A-team will vote to reject his nomination.
In a recent article in Commentary, essayist Algis Valiunas recounts that when war broke out in Europe in 1939, Franklin Roosevelt “issued a plea that all combatant nations do the decent thing and refrain from bombing.” And yet, he continues, “President Roosevelt’s high-mindedness did not count for much once the action was under way.” The Nazis, for whom terror from the skies was no more anathema than every other form of terror they practiced, were the first to bomb civilian targets, beginning with Warsaw and moving on to Rotterdam and London.
Within a couple of years, the Allies were retaliating in kind, which in current parlance would be known as “lowering oneself to the level of one’s enemies.” At the Casablanca conference in January 1943, Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill promised to undertake “the heaviest possible bomber offensive against the German war effort.” Six months later that terrible promise was fulfilled over Hamburg by 700 British bombers. In Mr. Valiunas’s telling, it was a scene from the Inferno: “Oxygen starvation and carbon monoxide poisoning killed many; bomb shelters turned into ovens and roasted the persons inside, so that rescue workers days later found the bodies seared together in an indistinguishable mass; the molten asphalt of the streets engulfed those who fled the burning buildings.”
An estimated 45,000 people died this way in Hamburg. U.S. and British air forces would repeat the procedure over Dresden, Tokyo, Yokohama, Hiroshima, Nagasaki–cities of real or at least arguable military significance. Hundreds of smaller cities and towns of doubtful strategic value were also reduced to ash and rubble, bringing the total civilian death toll to about 600,000 Germans (including 75,000 children under 14) and a roughly equal number of Japanese. How can this be justified? Does it not greatly diminish Allied claims to moral superiority?
Most people would argue that it does not, even though the horror of what was done to Hamburg and the other cities dwarfs in moral scale the worst U.S. abuses in the war on terror (real or alleged), which are so frequently cited as evidence that we have debased ourselves beyond recognition. Most people would also agree that the only compelling ethical defense that can be made for the bombing campaign is that it hastened Allied victory, spared at least as many lives (on both sides) as it cost, and created the conditions for a more peaceful postwar world. In other words, the question here isn’t about the intrinsic morality of the bombing. It’s about whether the good that flowed from the bombing outweighed the unmistakable evil of the act itself.
Among historians, there is a lively debate about whether that result was achieved. In the cases of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the evidence that the bombings ended the war and saved as many as a million Allied and Japanese lives is overwhelming. A somewhat better argument can be made that the bombing of Germany failed to justify its price in human suffering, particularly the bombing of non-strategic targets. Yet as historian Richard Overy has noted, “There has always seemed something fundamentally implausible about the contention of bombing’s critics that dropping almost 2.5 million tons of bombs on tautly stretched industrial systems and war-weary urban populations would not seriously weaken them.”
Whatever side one takes here, the important point is that the debate fundamentally is about results. Note the difference with the current debate over waterboarding, where opponents argue that the technique is unconscionable and inadmissible under any circumstances, even in hypothetical cases where the alternative to waterboarding is terrorist attacks resulting in mass casualties among innocent civilians. According to this view, it is possible to wage war yet avoid the classic “choice of evils” dilemmas that confronted past statesmen such as Churchill and Roosevelt. Or, to put the argument more precisely, it is possible to avoid this choice if one is also prepared to pay for it in blood–if not in one’s own, than in that of kith and kin and whoever else’s life must be sacrificed to keep our consciences clear.
Paul Tibbets, too, had a clear conscience. “Why be bashful?” he told the Columbus Dispatch in 2003. “That’s what it took to end the war.” Tibbets needed no instruction in the cruelties of war. But he also understood that awful things would have to be done in order to be spared greater harms. One senses Judge Mukasey understands that too–further evidence of his fitness to serve as attorney general.
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Gosh darn, if we’d have only chatted, not.
I love debasing myself.
Two wrongs don’t make it right, but it makes things equal. First I heard that Queen Latifa said it. Long live the Queen.
November 6th, 2007 at 6:32 amthe nazi’s were evil but were not insanely fanatical like the japanese
the last time we faced fanatics who took honor in suicidal attacks we had to use nuclear weapons to force their surrender
funny how history repeats itself
November 6th, 2007 at 7:26 amI once read of an NFL linebacker from Denver who shared of his wife’s struggles with cancer. Something he said in that article comes to mind. He said, “You have to take it to a level that your oppenent cannot and will not go, in order to succeed.” Nuff said
November 6th, 2007 at 7:38 amSteve~ All I want to point out is Truman was the man, but I’d assume it’s a lot easier to drop nukes when you are the only one who has them. It’d be like playing poker with both jokers in your hand.
November 6th, 2007 at 7:42 amThis is the problem with the theory that mutually assured destruction will work now with the islamofascists as it did with the Soviets. Where as both the citizens of the USA and USSR are enamoured with life and seek to perpetually improve their lot and enjoy life, the islamofascists do not share that same point of view. Life is an inconvenient waystation, an uncomfortable situation that one must endure before returning to Allah thereby making a sacrifice of life the most beloved choice among all things that are required by him. Much like Steve in NC stated, there is only one way to combat a fanaticism as this. Providing Habeus Corpus and a publicly funded defense attorney do not accomplish our desired goal. Mushroom clouds over Tehran, Damascus, Gaza, Somalia and Waziristan will eventually be the beginning of the end for islamofascism. The only question that remains is where the mushroom cloud will appear that motivates us into action? Hint: Tel Aviv has no religious significance therefore is open for targeting by those who would do Isreal and the West harm (And well within range).
November 6th, 2007 at 8:11 amAccording to our politicians, we must show the enemy we are stronger than they are by NOT waterboarding them.
So, we must give illegal aliens driver’s licenses and we must give rights to illegal combatants. What are my rights as a legal citizen again?
November 6th, 2007 at 9:51 amas part of navy seal training you are waterboarded no? if it were truly torture… why would we subject our own bravest fighters to it? and there’s this video going around on al gores tv thing…
if groups of our own people are willing to VOLUNTARILY go through it HOW CAN IT BE TORTURE? you don’t see these people willing to have their fingernails pulled out, or be subjected to anything that occurs in communist or islamofascist prisons… but they are willing to be waterboarded “just to see” or to demonstrate it…
November 6th, 2007 at 10:04 amWatch a demo of waterboarding here:
http://hotair.com/archives/2006/11/04/video-steve-harrigan-gets-waterboarded-on-fox/
now that is just horrific!!
check out how alqueeeda treats it’s prisoners with respect to the geneva convention
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=20919
November 6th, 2007 at 10:44 amIt’s called SEER training - Survive, Evade, Escape, Return. A training format created out of the realities of the Vietnam War, it teaches our soldiers, pilots and marines the skills required to not only evade capture and facillitate rescue, but also how to deal with the trials of torture as they are applied by your captors. Waterboarding is an element of that training. Everybody witnesses a subject being waterboarded, but only volunteers are actually put through the process. The course also covers sleep deprivation, temperature variation, diet reduction, isolation, close quarters confinement, etc. Much as the Green Berets, SEALS, Delta, TACP, FIST and other doctrines saw their creation/refinement based on Vietnam Lessons Learned, so does SEER. Modeled after the debriefings received from POW Camp survivors, it is one of the most important corses that Rangers, Operators (SEAL/Delta/SF), Pathfinders, Force Recon, FIST and ETACs can take part in.
November 6th, 2007 at 10:47 amTwo wrongs don’t make a right, but the second wrong makes damn sure the first NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN.
November 6th, 2007 at 10:53 amGood article. This whole waterboarding “debate” is an embarassing joke. Oh well, AG Mulkasey was approved in Judiciary Cmtee anyway despite Billary’s, Obama’s, Durbin’s etc.’s slamming him (he was nominated at first after Harry Reid and Chuckie Schumer said they would approve of him). The hypocracy knows no bounds. Can these dems really be that stupid: let’s distract the entire country into being concerned about “waterboarding” and “global warming,” when AlQueda is trying to mass murder Americans, the dollar is going down the tubes, we are now 60% dependent on foreign oil whose price is approaching $100/barrel(as opposed to 30% in the 1970’s), genocide is occurring in Darfur, etc., etc., but waterboarding and “global warming” are the most important issues going on today.
November 6th, 2007 at 1:59 pmClinton and Obama just disqualified themselves. In my mind, they were never qualified, but this “should” change some lefty minds.
Even Chuck Schumer is OK with Mukasey.
November 6th, 2007 at 2:09 pmNo, no, Jam, you don’t get it. NOTHING will “disqualify” Clinton and Obama; they are Anti-GWB! That covers all, excuses all, and there’s an end to it.
November 6th, 2007 at 11:34 pmsteve in NC,
the human events article was informing and interssting. I will show it to libs who continue to suggest that we are just like the terrorists.
November 7th, 2007 at 2:44 am