Burn Them?

Defense of Phosphorus Use Turns Into Damage Control
By SCOTT SHANE
The debate over American use of white phosphorus weapons in Iraq was aggravated, military officials admit, by an inconsistent response to an Italian documentary.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/21/international/21phosphorus.html?th&emc=th

Some of the most shameful acts by the Allies in WW2 (apart from the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) were the fire bombings of cities directed at killing masses of civilians. We used this tactic on Dresden, a largely wooden German city noted for making dishes, and on Tokyo, a city of paper and wood, where our fire bombings killed far more than the totals of our two nuclear attacks.

Kurt Vonnegut memorialized the horrors of the Dresden bombing in his novel, Slaughterhouse Five:

http://www.vonnegutweb.com/sh5/sh5_nytimes.html

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/vonnegut.htm

He had been there and survived as a prisoner of war fortuitously held deep underground. Many thousands died as the result of the fire storm with winds of several hundred miles an hour which swept anyone and anything into its inferno center created by our combination of high explosive bombs (creating much 'kindling wood') followed by phosphorous incendiaries.

One can only believe that those running our horrendous war on Iraq now were not alive then and watching Movietone News or perusing Life Magazine's graphic pictorial representations of such horrors. How can we as a nation operate with such a lack of imagination as we learn of the loss of our own soldiers -- a daily drum beat -- and receive only strangulated reports of killings of "insurgents" by the dozens -- exterminated by our troops firing wildly at any threatening figure or approaching automobile, phosphorous and rocket attacks from above on suspect targets?

Perhaps my young childhood memories of such things are an indication of an immature sensibility still at work in the face of such manifest human suffering. But I do not think so. Rather I believe we Americans have been horrendously desensitized by the steady diet of violence that we see day in and day out on our TV screens. This is not the way the rest of the world perceives things, however -- particularly those who suffered directly the horrors of WW2 and the subsequent wars from which the U.S. homeland was fortunately immunized.

Burn them -- our distant enemies?
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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