Hiroshima Day 2010

For the interested my thoughts anent Hiroshima can be found on my post from August 2009. I think it's a good thing that, for the first time, we're sending a relatively high ranking representative - the U.S. ambassador to Japan - to the commemorative ceremony but I feel there's still a long way to go before we own up to the consequences of our choice to drop the A-bomb in the first place.

Actually, this year's anniversary brings to mind the recent revelations from WikiLeaks concerning the failing occupation in Afghanistan and the continued existence of the same moral blinkers that made Hiroshima possible. Tom Engelhardt's latest TomDispatch asks the question about just whose hands are bloody - hypothetically Mr. Assange's or the architects of the Afghan War's whose casualties are all too real. The following are all examples of the real blood on the real hands of the real war criminals in this affair:

• July 2008 - An American plane or planes "take out" an Afghan bridal party -- 70 to 90 strong and made up mostly of women -- on a road near the Pakistani border.
• August 2008 - A memorial service for a tribal leader in the village of Azizabad in Afghanistan’s Herat Province is hit by repeated U.S. air strikes that kill at least 90 civilians, including perhaps 15 women and up to 60 children.
• April 2009 - Members of the family of Awal Khan, an Afghan army artillery commander on duty elsewhere, are killed in a U.S.-led raid in Khost province in eastern Afghanistan. Among them are his "schoolteacher wife, a 17-year-old daughter named Nadia, a 15-year-old son, Aimal, and his brother, employed by a government department.” Another daughter is wounded and the pregnant wife of Khan's cousin is shot five times in the abdomen.
• November 2009 - Two relatives of Majidullah Qarar, the spokesman for the Minister of Agriculture, are shot down in cold blood in Ghazni City in a Special Operations night raid.
• February 2010 - U.S. Special Forces troops in helicopters strike a convoy of mini-buses, killing up to 27 civilians, including women and children.
• February 2010 - In a special operations night raid, two pregnant women and a teenage girl, as well as a police officer and his brother, are shot to death in their home.
• July 2010 - Residents of a small town in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan claim that a NATO missile attack killed 52 civilians.

I am reminded of something I just read in Peter Heather's Empires and Barbarians: As a result of Roman diplomatic and military policy along its frontiers (which included, among other things, periodic incursions to install "good" leaders/depose "bad" and destroy the means of production), the empire sowed the seeds of its own destruction by fostering the growth of anti-Roman, organized polities.

Except for the actors, what's really changed in 2,000 years?

Hiroshima Musings

I hope it doesn't need to be said that today and Sunday will mark the 64th anniversary of the days we instantly incinerated 100,000+ people and condemned even more to lives scarred by cancers and other fallout from dropping the "Bomb" on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

If not, you can refresh your memories here, here and here.

But it also terrified the Japanese into ending then and there a war that had lasted nearly five years and had claimed its own enormous share of casualties.

And that's the moral question: Considering the qualitatively different nature of atomic weaponry, were we justified in using the A-bomb? (Actually, it raises the broader question of bombing at all when we know full well the targets are primarily civilians but I confine myself today to the "atomic" aspect of the question.)

When my brother and I were kids, we collected quite a bit of WW2-related stuff - from Time-Life books to Avalon Hill's plethora of war-related games (remember "Axis & Allies"?). The question of the Bomb's morality and whether or not there had been alternatives hardly signified. (Let's be honest, at least in American literature, the Bomb was "good" and "justified.") As I've grown older, though, my feelings about war and the military have changed; I've read a wide range of views on the subject, and I've thought about it (particularly during those first weeks of August when it seems no one but the survivors and their kin remember Hiroshima). When it comes down to landing on one side of the issue or the other, I have to say that dropping the Bomb was both a moral and a (long-term) strategic mistake. Morally because waging war is an obscenity (a mortal sin, if you want to go Catholic about it). Even though we were forced into conflict, our moral imperative was to limit the damage inflicted on ourselves and our foes. Strategically because we set a precedent: If the putative "leader of the Free World" saw fit to use a device of such destructive power why can't a similarly righteously motivated nation use it? Or, far worse, why can't atomic weapons simply be counted as just another sword in the arsenal?

But...

There's a scene in Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns where the retiring Commissioner Gordon is explaining to his replacement why she shouldn't oppose the Batman. The context is the beginning of World War 2 and Pearl Harbor but I think the point is still valid:

GORDON: A few years back, I was reading a news magazine. A lot of people with a lot of evidence said that Roosevelt knew Pearl was going to be attacked and that he let it happen.

Wasn't proven. Things like that never are. I couldn't stop thinking how horrible that would be, and how Pearl was what got us off our duffs in time to stop the Axis.

But a lot of innocent men died.

But we won the war.

It bounced back and forth in my head until I realized I couldn't judge it. It was too big. (page 96 in my edition)

Without the benefit of hindsight, can we legitimately judge Truman and his advisors?

Perhaps not. Perhaps - no, definitely - where we've failed as a country and as moral agents is facing the consequences of the action, and deciding that it will never happen again, and taking the necessary steps to ensure that it doesn't.