Only a lunatic would count such as the "ultimate" war crime. Genocide is far far worse.
Precisely what we have in you. An Uncle Sam semen slurping lunatic.
-------------------
NATO violated a substantial part of the Nuremberg Judgments, directed at Nazi war criminals, which held that the ultimate crime in international law, the ultimate war crime - which carries with it every crime that may be committed in the war - is launching an unprovoked attack upon another state.
1. but you can't seem to ever point out anything that I'm actually wrong about.
2. And thankfully our invasion of Afghanistan was entirely legal.
3. Says the person who can't point out anything that I am wrong about.
4. our invasion of Afghanistan was entirely legal.
---------------
Afghanistan: The Other Illegal War
The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was every bit as illegal as the invasion of Iraq. Why, then, do so many Americans see it as justifiable?
...
In light of stepped-up violence in Afghanistan, and for political reasons -- following Obama's lead -- Bush will be moving troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. Although the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was as illegal as the invasion of Iraq, many Americans see it as a justifiable response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the casualties in that war have been lower than those in Iraq -- so far. Practically no one in the United States is currently questioning the legality or propriety of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan. The cover of Time magazine calls it "The Right War."
The U.N. Charter provides that all member states must settle their international disputes by peaceful means, and no nation can use military force except in self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council. After the 9/11 attacks, the council passed two resolutions, neither of which authorized the use of military force in Afghanistan. Resolutions 1368 and 1373 condemned the Sept. 11 attacks and ordered the freezing of assets; the criminalizing of terrorist activity; the prevention of the commission of and support for terrorist attacks; and the taking of necessary steps to prevent the commission of terrorist activity, including the sharing of information. In addition, it urged ratification and enforcement of the international conventions against terrorism.
The invasion of Afghanistan was not legitimate self-defense under article 51 of the charter because the attacks on Sept. 11 were criminal attacks, not "armed attacks" by another country. Afghanistan did not attack the United States. In fact, 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, there was not an imminent threat of an armed attack on the United States after Sept. 11, or Bush would not have waited three weeks before initiating his October 2001 bombing campaign. The necessity for self-defense must be "instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation." This classic principle of self-defense in international law has been affirmed by the Nuremberg Tribunal and the U.N. General Assembly.
Bush's justification for attacking Afghanistan was that it was harboring Osama bin Laden and training terrorists. Iranians could have made the same argument to attack the United States after they overthrew the vicious Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1979 and he was given safe haven in the United States. The people in Latin American countries whose dictators were trained in torture techniques at the School of the Americas could likewise have attacked the torture training facility in Fort Benning, Ga., under that specious rationale. Those who conspired to hijack airplanes and kill thousands of people on 9/11 are guilty of crimes against humanity. They must be identified and brought to justice in accordance with the law. But retaliation by invading Afghanistan is not the answer and will only lead to the deaths of more of our troops and Afghans.
The hatred that fueled 19 people to blow themselves up and take 3,000 innocents with them has its genesis in a history of the U.S. government's exploitation of people in oil-rich nations around the world. Bush accused the terrorists of targeting our freedom and democracy. But it was not the Statue of Liberty that was attacked. It was the World Trade Center, the symbol of the U.S.-led global economic system; and the Pentagon, the heart of the U.S. military, that took the hits. Those who committed these heinous crimes were attacking American foreign policy. That policy has resulted in the deaths of 2 million Iraqis -- from both Bill Clinton's punishing sanctions and George W. Bush's war. It has led to uncritical support of Israel's brutal occupation of Palestinian lands, and it has stationed more than 700 U.S. military bases in foreign countries.
... you can't seem to ever point out anything that I'm actually wrong about.
You've long been advancing the absolutely fatuous evil lie that the USA doesn't target civilians.
Quote:
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
For America, Life Was Cheap in Vietnam
By NICK TURSE
OCTOBER 9, 2013
OBITUARIES of Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese general who helped drive the American military from his country, noted, as The New York Times put it, that “his critics said that his victories had been rooted in a profligate disregard for the lives of his soldiers.”
The implication is that the United States lost the war in Vietnam because General Giap thought nothing of sending unconscionable numbers of Vietnamese to their deaths.
Yet America’s defeat was probably ordained, just as much, by the Vietnamese casualties we caused, not just in military cross-fire, but as a direct result of our policy and tactics. While nearly 60,000 American troops died, some two million Vietnamese civilians were killed, and millions more were wounded and displaced, during America’s involvement in Vietnam, researchers and government sources have estimated.
Enraged, disgusted and alienated by the abuse they suffered from troops who claimed to be their allies, even civilians who had no inclination to back our opponents did so.
Now, four decades later, in distant lands like Pakistan and Afghanistan, civilians are again treating the United States as an enemy, because they have become the collateral damage of our “war on terror,” largely unrecognized by the American public.
In more than a decade of analyzing long-classified military criminal investigation files, court-martial transcripts, Congressional studies, contemporaneous journalism and the testimony of United States soldiers and Vietnamese civilians, I found that Gen. William C. Westmoreland, his subordinates, superiors and successors also engaged in a profligate disregard for human life.
A major reason for these huge losses was that American strategy was to kill as many “enemies” as possible, with success measured by body count. Often, those bodies were not enemy soldiers.
To fight its war of attrition, the United States declared wide swaths of the South Vietnamese countryside to be free-fire zones where even innocent civilians could be treated as enemy forces. Artillery shelling, intended to keep the enemy in a state of constant unease, and near unrestrained bombing slaughtered noncombatants and drove hundreds of thousands of civilians into slums and refugee camps.
Soldiers and officers explained how rules of engagement permitted civilians to be shot for running away, which could be considered suspicious behavior, or for standing still when challenged, which could also be considered suspicious. Veterans I’ve interviewed, and soldiers who spoke to investigators, said they had received orders from commanders to “kill anything that moves.”
“The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does the Westerner,” Westmoreland famously said. “Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient.”
Having spoken to survivors of massacres by United States forces at Phi Phu, Trieu Ai, My Luoc and so many other hamlets, I can say with certainty that Westmoreland’s assessment was false.
Decades after the conflict ended, villagers still mourn loved ones — spouses, parents, children — slain in horrific spasms of violence. They told me, too, about what it was like to live for years under American bombs, artillery shells and helicopter gunships; about what it was like to negotiate every aspect of their lives around the “American war,” as they call it; how the war transformed the most mundane tasks — getting water from a well or relieving oneself or working in the fields or gathering vegetables for a hungry family — into life-or-death decisions; about what it was like to live under United States policies that couldn’t have been more callous or contemptuous toward human life.
Westmoreland was largely successful in keeping much of the evidence of atrocities from the American public while serving as Army Chief of Staff. A task force, known as the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group, operating out of his Pentagon office, secretly assembled many thousands of pages of investigative files about American atrocities, which I discovered in the National Archives.
Despite revelations about the massacre at My Lai, the United States government was able to suppress the true scale of noncombatant casualties and to imply that those deaths that did occur were inadvertent and unavoidable. This left the American public with a counterfeit history of the conflict.
Without a true account of our past military misdeeds, Americans have been unprepared to fully understand what has happened in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, where attacks on suspected terrorists have killed unknown numbers of innocent people. As in Vietnam, officials have effectively prevented the public from assessing this civilian toll.
We need to abandon our double standards when it comes to human life. It is worth noting the atrocious toll born of an enemy general’s decisions. But, at the very least, equal time ought to be given to the tremendous toll borne by civilians as a result of America’s wars, past and present.
You've long been advancing the absolutely fatuous evil lie that the USA doesn't target civilians.
The US has not targeted civilians in the past 100 years. Even with the A-bombs on Japan, notice how we only dropped the weapons on military targets, and only at the height of the most brutal war in human history.
JTT wrote:
For America, Life Was Cheap in Vietnam
Collateral damage is certainly unfortunate, but it isn't our fault that North Vietnam insisted on war with our ally.
Could someone please explain why these guys are not under indictment/in jail?
Because no one has the moral authority to condemn them.
The only crime that the Bush Administration committed was their authorization of torture.
The American Left gave Clinton a pass for committing a long string of felonies just so he could cover up an affair, and now they have no right to complain that a Republican authorized torture with the goal of saving American lives.
The rest of the world doesn't care when Americans are victims of torture, so they have no right to complain when Americans are perpetrators of torture.
If you'd like it in "Al Gore speak": There's no controlling legal authority.
0 Replies
bobsal u1553115
1
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Mon 30 Jun, 2014 05:57 am
Detroit and Iraq: Both Devastated by the Same Thieves
Iraq was invaded with soldiers, guns and bombs. Detroit was invaded by the corporate “suits” who made a fast buck for themselves.
DETROIT, MICHIGAN - NOV 21: Abandoned Packard factory ruins on a sunny afternoon on November 21, 2012. Abandoned in 1958, the buildings still stand in a decayed state of beauty.
Photo Credit: Atomazul/Shutterstock
June 27, 2014 |
The ugly face of empire and disaster capitalism is visible all over the world. Detroit, Michigan, was once a thriving city but was sent into a tailspin by the deindustrialization of the United States, white flight, and institutional racism which blamed black people who were in fact the victims of catastrophe. The coup de grace was delivered by big banks like UBS, Bank of America and Barclays, which sold risky derivatives schemes to corrupt Detroit politicians. When the financial deal inevitably headed south, the banks were the creditors first in line for a payout.
Far back in that line were the workers and people of Detroit. The emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, whose very position they had voted against establishing, rules the city. The new mayor is a figurehead and the people have no representation as the Republican governor and emergency manager remake the city for capital and the gentrifying settler class.
A world away in Iraq, a nation is crumbling under the weight of eleven years of violent occupation by the United States. The once developing nation is now a ruin, with all of its infrastructure and systems from health care to education destroyed by western avarice. The prime minister who was chosen with America’s blessing, Nouri al-Maliki, has now become an inconvenience and faces a bleak fate.
The Bush administration and now the Obama team determined that promoting one side in sectarian political disputes would make for a smooth running and profitable occupation. Instead they brought war between Sunni and Shia and with goal of knocking down more dominoes, continued to fund jihadists who always upset their plans. Now Maliki is being told to get out of office if he wants help in crushing the enemies that America made for his country.
Just as Iraq’s infrastructure has been destroyed, Detroit residents now live without basic services which ought to be regarded as the right of every human being. In the United States, a country which boasts of its high level of advancement, residents of a major city must plead to the international community for the right to access water.
In a city already on the brink, the powers that be chose to pressure struggling people to pay increased fees for water. They have also used harsh and sometimes improper methods to deprive even those who have paid their bills. No one can survive at all without water to drink, and one cannot survive very well without water for cooking, cleaning and sanitation. Very powerful people in boardrooms and government offices made decisions that turned Detroit into an Iraq in America’s midst and now sneer at pleas for mercy.
Desperate Detroiters represented by the Blue Planet Project, the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization, Food & Water Watch and the Detroit People’s Water Board, have made their case to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Safe Drinking Water. They issued a report which outlines the latest scheme to destroy Detroit as a city and as a home to poor and working people. The plan will ultimately privatize the water system and make Detroit another location for prime real estate and riches for the few.
President Obama and his cohorts in the Democratic and Republican parties will go to any lengths to prop up the empire, but do little to help people in need. American allies in Ukraine or Iraq and other countries receive astronomical sums of money in order to help maintain Manifest Destiny. Poor people in Detroit and the rest of the country are not so lucky. They are seen only as obstacles to putting the rule of capital firmly in place.
Iraq was invaded with soldiers, guns and bombs. Detroit was invaded by the corporate “suits” who made a fast buck for themselves. The end result is the same for Michiganders and Iraqis alike. They end up suffering in a plundered society while other people make out like the bandits that they really are.
The organizations which reached out to the U.N. took an important step in changing the Detroit narrative. Politicians and the corporate media dismiss the city’s troubles as the fault of incompetent black people. All of former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s incompetence could not have created the ongoing occupation of Detroit by the thieves in high places. The outreach to the United Nations is important for another reason. It points out that millions of Americans live an existence far from the myth of the great country. They are struggling to survive just like millions in the so-called third world. It is the gangsters who run the show in Baghdad and in Michigan too.
0 Replies
bobsal u1553115
1
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Mon 30 Jun, 2014 06:01 am
@oralloy,
Quote:
The US has not targeted civilians in the past 100 years. Even with the A-bombs on Japan, notice how we only dropped the weapons on military targets, and only at the height of the most brutal war in human history.
You say that like its a fact. Bull ****. Prove it. What make Hiroshima and Nagasaki a military target that justified vaporizing several hundred thousand "colateral" civilians?
The Debacle of the Caliphates: Why al-Baghdadi’s Grandiosity doesn’t Matter
By Juan Cole | Jun. 30, 2014 |
By Juan Cole
Ibrahim al-Badri, a run-of-the-mill Sunni Iraqi cleric, gained a degree from the University of Baghdad at a time when pedagogy there had collapsed because of the Saddam Hussein dictatorship and international sanctions. After 2003 he took the name Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and turned to a vicious and psychopathic violence involving blowing up children at ice cream shops and blowing up gerbils and garden snakes at pet shops and blowing up family weddings, then coming back and blowing up the resultant funerals. This man is one of the most infamous serial killers in modern history, with the blood of thousands on his hands, before whom Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy fade into insignificance.
Al-Baghdadi leads the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS or ISIL), which today changed its name just to “the Islamic State.” And its members made a pledge of fealty to al-Baghdadi as the “caliph.” Let us please call it the “so-called Islamic State,” since it bears all the resemblance to mainstream Islam that Japan’s Om Shinrikyo (which let sarin gas into the subway in 1995) bears to Buddhism.
After the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 in Medina, West Arabia, the clans of Mecca favored as his successor notables of his noble clan, the Quraysh (the “Little Shark Tribe”). The first three were Abu Bakr, Omar and `Uthman.
Some clans in the neighboring city of Medina preferred a dynastic principle, wanting to see a close relative of Muhammad succeed him as his vicar. They favored Ali ibn Abi Talib, his cousin and son-in-law, i.e., the closest thing he had to a living son at the time of his death. Ali was passed over three times by the notables in Mecca but finally became the fourth caliph in 656 AD. He was, however, assassinated in 661 only five years later. Those Muslims who accepted the first four “Orthodox caliphs” gradually became known as ‘people of the tradition,’ or ahl al-sunnah, i.e., the Sunnis.
The groups that became the Shiites think of Ali as the first vicar of the Prophet, or “Imam,” and believe his office should rightfully have gone to his sons Hasan and Husain, and then to Husain’s son, and so on through the generations. Most Shiites today believe that the Twelfth Imam disappeared as a small child but will one day reveal himself again and restore the world to justice, as the Mahdi.
After Ali’s assassination, the Umayyad kings ruled (661-750), and though some scholars have found that they claimed religious charisma, they were just Arab kings. A branch of the family of the Prophet tracing itself back to his uncle Abbas began making claims to rightful rule, however, and they were popular among the new converts from among the Persians in Iran, and in 750 they made a revolution against the Umayyads. They became the Abbasid caliphate, ruling until the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258.
The Abbasid caliphs gradually separated out their religious authority from secular authority, and later on rulers like the Buyids took Baghdad and gave the caliphs a stipend and limited the reach of their authority. Ira Lapidus argued that there was a de facto separation of religion and state in the Abbasid period.
After the embarrassing end of the caliphate at the hands of the Buddhist and animist Mongols, some attempts were made to revive the institution. They failed. The Mamluk state in Egypt in the medieval period maintained that a relative of the last caliph had escaped the Mongols to Cairo, and they maintained what some have called a “shadow caliphate” (Khilafah suriya) or pro forma caliphate. I don’t know of any Muslims who know the names of those supposed caliphs, or who refer to any of their rulings. I doubt they were widely recognized.
Although subsequent sultans or secular emperors sometimes were termed “caliphs” in flowery style by their courtiers, I can’t find any evidence of anyone taking that sort of thing seriously. In the 18th century Ahmad al-Damanhuri, a rector of al-Azhar Seminary in Cairo, the foremost center of Sunni learning, wrote an essay in which he was frank that the caliphate ended in 1258, that the Mamluk ‘shadow caliphate’ hadn’t amounted to much, and that the Ottomans were kings, not caliphs. The Sunni caliphate had lapsed. He said, however, that some of the Ottomans were better and more just rulers, as secular monarchs, than some of the caliphs had been. I know of no reason to think that al-Damanhuri’s views weren’t the prevailing ones on the eve of Middle Eastern modernity. {Ahmad al-Damanhuri, al-Naf` al-ghazir fi salah al-Sultan wa al-wazir, Egyptian National Library, Taymur Ijtima`, MS 34, p. 10).
Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876-1909) was concerned about European encroachment on Ottoman and Muslim lands (white Christians conquered Muslim-ruled states of India beginning 1757, Muslim Central Asia through the 19th Century and Algeria in 1830). The Iranian diplomat Mirza Malkum Khan cabled the shah back in Tehran in 1880 that Abdulhamid had decided to declare himself a caliph so as to turn the tables and claim authority in places like British India, where 1/4 of the population was Muslim. Although the idea that the Ottoman sultan was a caliph gained some purchase in British India, I don’t think it was widely accepted. British interviews with Egyptians after they conquered that country in 1882 suggested that Egyptians didn’t see Abdulhamid as a caliph.
Abdulhamid, despite saying he was a caliph, was overthrown by a democratic revolution in 1908-1909, which instituted a constitution and a parliament and tried to reduce the sultan-caliph to a figurehead. In early 1913, Young Turk military officers, however, made a coup and sent parliament home. They unwisely took the Ottoman Empire into WW I in alliance with Austria and Germany. Mehmed V, the new sultan-caliph (now relatively powerless) used his bully pulpit to declare jihad or holy war on France, Britain and Russia. The Ottomans were nevertheless defeated (and Indian Muslim troops helped in the defeating). After the war, the British and the French divided up the Ottoman provinces among themselves. Nationalist, secular general Mustafa Kemal refused to see Anatolia or Asia Minor, the heartland of Turkish speakers, divvied up, and launched a war to stop it. He won the Turkish state came into being. Its parliament declare itself a republic in 1923. In 1924 it abolished the caliphate.
The end of the caliphate did not matter to most Muslims. You don’t need a caliph to pray five times a day or fast Ramadan. In Egypt, Ali Abd al-Raziq, a court judge, argued in modernist fashion that no caliph is necessary. Some Egyptian clerics were uncomfortable with the idea, but they lost the argument. There was some jockeying to resurrect the caliphate in the mid-1920s, and the Egyptian king, Fuad I, threw his crown in the ring. But the fact is that none of the newly forming nation-states wanted a transnational authority like that, and no consensus could be reached, and the caliphate (such as it was, since I don’t think most Muslims bought into Abdulhamid’s project) lapsed again.
Small groups of cult-like fundamentalists ever after hoped for a restored caliphate, but it isn’t something on the minds of 99% of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims. Sunni Islam has come sociologically to resemble Protestant Christianity, lacking a formal center and largely organized on the basis of the nation-state. Thus each Muslim-majority country has a mufti, who is the highest legal authority, giving rulings on practice for the state. Ask the muftis, who have real authority backed by Muslim states, what they think of the serial murderer, al-Baghdadi.
I remember in 2004 Usama Bin Laden issued a speech in which he complained about the calamities rained down on the Muslim world by the European Christians ‘for the past 80 years.’ He was referring to the abolition of the caliphate by Ataturk in 1924. His theory was that without a caliph Muslims were easily divided and ruled by the great powers. The flaw in that theory is that the Ottomans claimed to be caliphs toward the end of the empire but the Great Powers still divided and ruled them. It is hard to argue with military power, and fancy religious titles won’t win such power struggles. Even the original Abbasid caliphate was ended by pagan Mongol steppe warriors who had lacquered, reticulated short bows that they could fire from horseback and which could penetrate armor. (Mongols had very sophisticated fletchers).
In fact, making grandiose claims on authority was common among Muslim leaders resisting the European colonial powers Often their followers thought that such leaders had the power to deflect European bullets and cannonballs. The popular Muslim notion of a Mahdi or rightly-guided figure who will be sent by god at the last days (sometimes, it is thought, at the same time Christ returns) was invoked for anti-colonial purposes on several occasions. A Mahdi or messiah rose up against the French in Egypt in 1799. The French killed him. Another Mahdi arose in the Sudan in the 1880s. The British killed him and then went on to rule the Sudan until 1956. Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq created the Mahdi Army, intended as a force to support the Mahdi, who he thought was about to appear, and which took on the US and British militaries in 2004; they lost on the battlefield.
And, of course, Mulla Omar Uruzgani of Afghanistan was proclaimed “caliph” by the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Hopefully he and al-Baghdadi will end up in the same jail cell so they can drive each other crazy claiming to be the real caliph. In fact, virtually no one in the Muslim world thinks Mulla Omar is a caliph.
The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood developed the institution of the Supreme Guide, which under President Muhammad Morsi in 2012-2013 developed theocratic aspirations. The Supreme Guide, Muhammad Badie, proved conspiratorial and controlling, and Morsi proved compliant. The vast majority of Egyptians were annoyed by this grandiosity, and they overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood government. Badie is in danger of being executed. I think that the Egyptian elite has gone too far in persecuting Muslim Brothers and branding them terrorists, mind you, and the death sentence on Badie is a human rights violation. But I’m just pointing out that calling yourself Supreme Guide and getting the loyalty of a sectarian group is no guarantee of worldly success. And the Brotherhood is way more important the the ‘Islamic State.’
This Baghdadi ‘caliphate’ thing is doomed, as well.
You want to see the future of Islam, look at the al-Nahda or Renaissance Party in Tunisia, which just successfully completed a term in office in coalition with a secular human rights-oriented party and a socialist party.
0 Replies
bobsal u1553115
1
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Mon 30 Jun, 2014 06:08 am
@BillRM,
So why were we cluster bombing in Iraq?
0 Replies
bobsal u1553115
1
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Mon 30 Jun, 2014 06:09 am
@oralloy,
So how high a number is that?
0 Replies
BillRM
0
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Mon 30 Jun, 2014 06:49 am
@bobsal u1553115,
Quote:
several hundred thousand
First you are overstating the numbers as the death total on either city was in fact over a hundred thousands but not several hundred thousands and second both had very important military targets.
Quote:
90,000–166,000 killed in Hiroshima
60,000–80,000 killed in Nagasaki
Total: 150,000–246,000+ killed
Compare that to one repeat one fire bombing of Tokyo
Quote:
On the night of 9–10 March ("Operation Meetinghouse"),[9] 334 B-29s took off to raid with 279 of them dropping 1,665 tons of bombs on Tokyo. The bombs were mostly the 500-pound (230 kg) E-46 cluster bomb which released 38 napalm-carrying M-69 incendiary bomblets at an altitude of 2,000–2,500 ft (610–760 m). The M-69s punched through thin roofing material or landed on the ground; in either case they ignited 3–5 seconds later, throwing out a jet of flaming napalm globs. A lesser number of M-47 incendiaries was also dropped: the M-47 was a 100-pound (45 kg) jelled-gasoline and white phosphorus bomb which ignited upon impact. In the first two hours of the raid, 226 of the attacking aircraft unloaded their bombs to overwhelm the city's fire defenses.[10] The first B-29s to arrive dropped bombs in a large X pattern centered in Tokyo's densely populated working class district near the docks in both Koto and Chuo city wards on the water; later aircraft simply aimed near this flaming X. Fourteen B-29s were lost.[11] The individual fires caused by the bombs joined to create a general conflagration, which would have been classified as a firestorm but for prevailing winds gusting at 17 to 28 mph (27 to 45 km/h).[12] Approximately 15.8 square miles (4,090 ha) of the city was destroyed and some 100,000 people are estimated to have died.[13][14] The US Strategic Bombing Survey later estimated that nearly 88,000 people died in this one raid, 41,000 were injured, and over a million residents lost their homes. The Tokyo Fire Department estimated a higher toll: 97,000 killed and 125,000 wounded. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department established a figure of 124,711 casualties including both killed and wounded and 286,358 buildings and homes destroyed. Richard Rhodes, historian, put deaths at over 100,000, injuries at a million and homeless residents at a million.[15] These casualty and damage figures could be low; Mark Selden wrote in Japan Focus:
The one city contain the Japanese Army headquarters that would had be the center of the Japanese defense of the home islands should we needed to invaded and the other was one of Japan largest seaport and a center of military manufacturing.
Next those bombing save both Allies and Japanese lives in the order of millions if not tens of millions should we needed to had invaded the home islands.
As my father would had likely been one of those Americans who would had been facing great risk of death if an invasion had been needed I am very grateful that the two bombs was indeed drop.
Footnote the toll on American troops was calculated to be likely so damn large if we needed to invaded the home islands that so many purple heart medals was manufacture that to this very day we are still drawing down that stockpile after all the military conflicts we had been in since 1945.
At the time of its bombing, Hiroshima was a city of both industrial and military significance. A number of military units were located nearby, the most important of which was the headquarters of Field Marshal Shunroku Hata's Second General Army, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan,[102] and was located in Hiroshima Castle. Hata's command consisted of some 400,000 men, most of whom were on Kyushu where an Allied invasion was correctly anticipated.[103] Also present in Hiroshima were the headquarters of the 59th Army, the 5th Division and the 224th Division, a recently formed mobile unit.[104] The city was defended by five batteries of 7-and-8-centimeter (2.8 and 3.1 in) anti-aircraft guns of the 3rd Anti-Aircraft Division, including units from the 121st and 122nd Anti-Aircraft Regiments and the 22nd and 45th Separate Anti-Aircraft Battalions. In total, over 40,000 military personnel were stationed in the city.[105]
Hiroshima was a minor supply and logistics base for the Japanese military, but it also had large stockpiles of military supplies.[106] The city was a communications center, a key port for shipping and an assembly area for troops.[72] It was also the second largest city in Japan after Kyoto that was still undamaged by air raids,[107] due to the fact that it lacked the aircraft manufacturing industry that was the XXI Bomber Command's priority target. On July 3, the Joint Chiefs of Staff placed it off limits to bombers, along with Kokura, Niigata and Kyoto.[108]
The city of Nagasaki had been one of the largest seaports in southern Japan, and was of great wartime importance because of its wide-ranging industrial activity, including the production of ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials. The four largest companies in the city were Mitsubishi Shipyards, Electrical Shipyards, Arms Plant, and Steel and Arms Works, which employed about 90% of the city's labor force, and accounted for 90% of the city's industry.[166] Although an important industrial city, Nagasaki had been spared from firebombing because its geography made it difficult to locate at night with AN/APQ-13 radar.[108]
Let's not forget that whatever the US government do, they can only do it because the American people voted them into power (Bush and Obama), so the voters are just as much to blame.
The solution to end the troubles would therefore be to only vote for politicians who promise to pull our troops out of the mideast and anywhere else that doesn't concern us.
Our Brit politicians (Blair/Brown/Cameron) have been fools too over the years but my conscience is clear because I never voted for any of them..
"Which is the greater fool, the fool or the fool who follows him?"- Obi Wan Kenobi
I still don't really get it, but thanks for the explanation.
0 Replies
BillRM
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Mon 30 Jun, 2014 01:54 pm
@Romeo Fabulini,
Quote:
The solution to end the troubles would therefore be to only vote for politicians who promise to pull our troops out of the mideast and anywhere else that doesn't concern us.
The US have a long history of Presidents that promise not to get us involved in conflicts and then turn around and do so.
Quote:
August 26, 1964 - President Johnson is nominated at the Democratic National Convention.
During his campaign he declares "We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves."
This go back all the way to President Wilson
Quote:
May 1915, US President Woodrow Wilson gave what is known as the “Too Proud to Fight Speech” in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. What is not commonly mentioned is that this speech was given at a citizen naturalization ceremony, and is properly titled, “Americanism and the Foreign Born.” The most famous passage in the speech is as follows:
The example of America must be a special example. The example of America must be the example not merely of peace because it will not fight, but of peace because peace is the healing and elevating influence of the world and strife is not. There is such a thing as a man being so right it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.
USA presidents are lying war criminals/terrorists and y'all support them when, if you had any gumption, any honesty, you'd see them in prison.
0 Replies
bobsal u1553115
1
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Mon 30 Jun, 2014 02:05 pm
Lets get back to Iraq now that you understand the entire infrastructure was purposely and thoroughly "degraded". No hospitals, contract killer/"contractors" barreling through streets running down civilians and machine gunning them down randomly on the street. Don't bother to deny it. There are thousand of these videos on youtube.
There is credibly 200,000 to 500,000 dead civilians in the track of US military presence in Iraq. Get over it. That's what it was.
There is credibly 200,000 to 500,000 dead civilians in the track of US military presence in Iraq. Get over it. That's what it was.
BULLSHIT...............and we[US] spend billions repairing and upgrading the infrastructure that was not maintains by the Iraq government for decades before the first Gulf War.
There was billions in cash also found being hoarded by the Saddam Hussein fraction and not being spend on the needs of the population including infrastructure needs.
