Monday, August 12, 2013
Hiroshima's Lessons for the War on Terror
Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog

"In the summer of '45, the United States concluded a war that had come to be seen by some as unwinnable after the carnage at Iwo Jima, with a bang.



On August 6th, the bomb fell on Hiroshima. And then on the 9th, it was Nagasaki's turn. Six days later, Japan, which had been preparing to fight to the last man, surrendered.

For generations of liberals, those two names would come to represent the horror of America's war machine, when they actually represented a pragmatic ruthlessness that saved countless American and Japanese lives.

There can hardly be a starker contrast to our endless unwinnable nation-building exercises in which nothing is ever finished until we give up than the way that Truman cut the Gordian Knot and avoided a long campaign that would have depopulated Japan and destroyed the lives of a generation of American soldiers.

That we can talk about Japan as a victory, that the famous couple was caught kissing in Times Square rather than sighing in relief, is attributable to that decision to use the bomb. Without it, Japan would have been another Iraq or Vietnam, we might have won it, eventually, at a terrible cost, but it would have destroyed our willingness to fight any future wars and would have given the USSR an early victory in Asia.

Professional soldiers understand the humanitarian virtue of ruthlessness. The pacifist civilian may gasp in horror at the sight of a mushroom cloud, but the professional soldier knows that the longer way around would have left every Japanese city looking far worse than Hiroshima.

More people died in the Battle of Okinawa on both sides than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
. . .
Our greatest weakness is that we want our enemies to love us. And so we pretend that our enemies are really our friends. We turn wars into humanitarian exercises that inflict a much worse toll on both sides than an actual war would have and then we wonder what went wrong.

Now America faces an enemy whose chief power is hate. The Islamic terrorist has no other real asset except his hate. Unfortunately hate is our weakness. We are an empire terrified of being hated, a world power that shrivels at the thought that someone might not like us. And so the nation that dropped two atomic bombs in August 1945 wilts before the hatred of a Nidal Hasan in August 2013. "

More and interesting comments at:
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2013/08/...-on-terror.html

@/Greenfield Ping @FP123@algernonpj@Palinista@W-Girl

ATG

Good post.

Another great one, thanks for the post and the ping, ATG!

Great Post ......thank you !!

@conservgramma @FP123 @W-Girl
You're wecome.

I grew up in an environment in which the bomb was seen as evil incarnate. Over time I was exposed to information that chowed that as harsh as the bomb was it was a 'kindness'. It ended the war quickly and decisively, saved innumerable Japanese and American lives.

Later still I found this lecture by Griffen describing how that fear was purposely created to emasculate the US:
Text
http://www.realityzone.com/granddesign1.html

Video