[airspirit]

We can talk about the philosophical angle until we're blue in the face, really, but never get to the crux of the matter.

The fact is that not everybody is a reasonable person. Not every nation is a reasonable nation. It is easy to say that Japan was a totalitarian regime at the time, but what you're missing is the cultural aspects of this. The Japanese people supported their Emperor wholeheartedly (not 100% of them did, but a vast majority were in his camp). This didn't just extend to Japanese citizens, but Japanese people worldwide.

You say that Granny over in Japan would be easily disarmed, but you fail to consider that if a group of armed militia rushes a platoon of pissed off soldiers, the soldiers aren't going to say: "Put down your weapons so we can take you prisoner!" They are going to open fire and level the oncoming militiamen. That is a reality of war.

Somebody commented on us inflicting the maximum amount of civilian casualties and how this was revenge. I reply with the fact that if we wanted revenge or to inflict the maximum amount of casualties, we would have flattened the emperor's house in Tokyo and took out one of their largest cities in the process.

We talk about the poor civilians that lost their lives in that city. How many were working in the vast array of factories that supported the Japanese war machine? Doesn't this make them complicit in a way? Naturally, the infants and extremely elderly were not, but a good portion of the population were all a part of the support effort for Japanese aggression.

Every day that we allowed Japan to fight, they would be slaughtering true innocents in the lands they invaded. Every day they would torture and kill prisoners of war. Every day they would continue to try to kill everything American they would come across.

In the end, it had to stop. Even though the US Navy and Marine Corps had them woefully outmatched in most of the Pacific rim, they continued their fight without care for what at that point was guaranteed loss. This was a country and a people that DIDN'T KNOW HOW TO LOSE.

We showed them how simple it would be to kill every last one of them, and it broke their spirits. That action was necessary.

It is easy to think that once we would have walked on their shores with an overwhelming force that they would have surrendered bloodlessly. Unfortunately, that is not reality.

The Japanese at that time were nothing like we are today. Even today, dishonor is worse than death, and they have to have nets around their dormitories at their schools to catch the students that try to kill themselves after tanking tests. They still have businessman that kill themselves once they realize that their enterprise is failing. These people would try to their last breath to protect their homeland for nothing more than the notion that it was the honorable thing to do.

There would be no surrender unless we guaranteed their deaths. It took us showing them how easily and dishonorably they could all die before they gave up.

It would be nice to walk over there and sing Kumbaya, but unfortunately, such notions are ridiculous. Once a people has set themselves on a course of action with the resolve that these people had, there can be no peaceful resolution without utter annihilation. The fact that we didn't flatten their entire nation with our war machine is a testimony to our restraint. We could have, however taxed our Navy and Merchant Marines, invaded with a force strong enough to kill every man, woman, and child in that country.

That would have been revenge.

What we did instead was broke the spirit of a people that never knew defeat, and forced them to surrender to us. We also did it in a way that, while you may not see the value of what we targetted, not only hurt them militarily, but spiritually. We didn't hit cities of huge social or cultural value (that sounds harsh, but those weren't two cities that were at the center of Japanese culture), we didn't hit the biggest cities we could target, and we chose cities that were key to their military might. While we didn't kill as many of the Japanese people as we easily could have, we ended up killing enough to break their will to continue. Even so, it took TWO STRIKES!!! before they finally gave up. The first one didn't do the job! If anything, it shows the resolve of that nation to have thousands of people die in less than a second and they STILL fought on undeterred. I think our choice of targets was impeccable. While you may say that philisophically there is everything wrong with that, I think that we should be happy that the casualties were as low as they were, because if we HADN'T dropped the bomb on them, there would have been more casualties in the following six months than in any six month period of the European end of the conflict.

You can weep for the people over there, and there is nothing wrong with that. To say that what we did, though, was not merciful, is wrong. If we had invaded instead of bombed them, that country would still be recovering from the devastation today. If you consider that a preferrable outcome to what took place, well, more power to you.

I can accept a difference of opinion. I'm dead set in my beliefs from my understanding of what happened. I've talked to people that fought in the Pacific and know first hand the brutality of that conflict. There was no more terrible fighting force than the Japanese, because they showed no mercy whatsoever. To believe that they would suddenly become docile upon invasion is ludicrous to me, but we all have the right to believe what we want. Hell, there are people all over the world that stobbornly insist that the holocaust never really happened, and that it was really Jews that piloted the planes on 9/11 by remote control.

In the end, I don't care what you guys think, because that's your choice. I just wanted to put in my two cents on what I believe and what I feel.

Anyway, WSU beat UCLA, so my home boys over in Pullman are going to the Rose Bowl. I think the game against Oklahoma is going to be one hell of a good game to watch. You all should check it out.