On Nov 4, 11:49?am, wrote:
On Nov 4, 2:35 pm, wrote:





On Sun, 04 Nov 2007 10:00:20 -0800, Chuck Gould

wrote:
So Douglas MacArthur cannot be counted among those who were *morally*
opposed to the use of nuclear weapons, only among those who claim to
have felt, back in 1945, that using nuclear weapons on Japan was not
*strategically* necessary to force a Japanese surrender.
In fact, he claims to have thought that Japan would have surrendered
weeks before the bomb was dropped (and of course that event would have
saved American lives as well) if we had been flexible enough to allow
them to keep the Emperor in place.

One of the many shoulda, coulda, wouldas, and what-ifs of discussing
history. :-)

We still had the problem of convincing the Japanese army they were
beat.
They had been raised with the "no surrender" ethic and without the
horrible spectre of the A bombs I am not sure we would have been
successful in getting them to stop fighting.

Some people just won't beleive that, no matter how it came out. We are
the bad guys here, always making the wrong decisions after being
attacked and treated like animals... stupid us...


There are few decisons ever made that are all good or all bad. On any
level. Most of the decisions we ever make will have certain
consequences we could not have foreseen when making them. Examining
the consequnces of past decisions can help us make better choices,
(sometimes), in the future.

The problem with adopting a view that "Everything we do is always
wrong" or the reverse, "Everything we do is always right" is that it
precludes learning from past results. We live in a very competitive
world, and if we rest on our moral laurels unwilling to examine the
process by which we make decisions, our motivations behind some of
those decisions, and the positive/negative/unintended consequences of
those decisions we can expect to be overtaken (maybe even physically)
by a society willing to be more objective in its self analysis.

Love for your country should be like love for your kids, not love of
your God. If you're religious, you never question God and simply
follow what you believe is divine will. Because you love your kids,
you will be concerned for their welfare, willing to sacrifice and
rearrange priorities to provide for them, and concerned at all times
for their welfare. If you truly love your kids you don't normally say,
"Go ahead and do whatever you want. Because you're my kids you can't
possibly do anything wrong and whatever choice you make you can count
on me to support 100%." When you love your kids, you help them learn
to make the best possible choices, and part of that process is
examining the results of choices made in the past.

There is no question that nuking those two cities in Japan
precipitated an end to the war. From that perspective, the tactic was
successful.
It's not wrong or unpatriotic to examine whether there were options
available at the time, and if there were, whether we chose the best
one.




Now, just like then, the best way to support the troops is to let em'
win...

Another way to support the troops is to avoid sending them into combat
without a clearly defined mission (makes it much harder to "win") and
when the security of the United States or an ally is not at stake. I'd
like to see us learn from some of our difficulties in the last 60
years and become more adept at fighting guerilla warriors. We've got
the "beat an organized army" aspect down pretty well, we need to
improve our ability to handle quasi-civilian enemies who strike from
ambush and then disappear into a crowd of innocent bystanders.