It is often regarded by navy personnel that MacArthur's plan to invade the Phillipines was pointless for the winning of the war against Japan, and I agree on that, but I think that MacArthur aim was not military but political. He was focusing on what may happen after the war. He had to show to any other people in Asia that the Americans would support their allies.

Was he right? Did this plan spare American casualties during the post-war years? How can we measure this? History only happens once, making useless any scientifical approach to the matter. It is not easy to judge a commander's strategic actions during a total war, because we don't have data on parallel scenarios. What was is what it was. Navy and Army personnel may discuss forever whether MacArthur was right.

I would like to ask this author since he is on the sidelines and trying to appropiate today's reckless social mores to what happned Nagasaki,and Hiroshima,when our Maarines were fihgting guys who were a lot more fanatical than the Germans.Ask any Servicemen who served in the Pacific War that dumb question and their will tell you off.In fact, I remember a dumb reporter asking this question to a guy who served in the Pacific if the bombing was justified and he said hell yes, and says he wish more bombs had been dropped.It is amazing that they yellow bellied lefist or so concerned about casualities when it is non action and pacificsim that brings about more bad behavior.

Lisa, I don't think Walzer is just mindlessly appropriating today's social mores to a different time/issue. I particularly don't think he disagrees with the decisions that were made, by and large, re: Dresden and the bombings of Japan.

What he is doing is -- and this is the purpose of the book -- taking a hard look at the ethical and moral issues associated with war, and particularly with extreme measures in war.

By the way, this is the book that is used in the ethics class at West Point, for just that reason.

These guys are making academic arguments. To anyone with relatives or friends in combat, the issues are not so academic. To me, what it boils down to is who gets to live and who has to die. Call me callous, but the Axis powers had shown by their wartime atrocities against the defeated powers that this wasn't a joust, fought by chivalric rules. Losing to them would have meant mass death. Against such a possibility, I would kill 1,000 of their innocent to save 1 of my own.

It has to be remembered that bombings of Italian industrial centers led to revolts against Mussolini, and many hoped that bombing of German cities would lead to a similar effect. Unfortunately the effect was just the opposite. To alrge part probably because the fascisti had been in power for a decade longer than the Nazis, and Germans didn't have had as much time to grow as sick of them as the Italians were of Musssolini's regime.

Furthermore the British listened to (mostly leftwing) German emigres who also told them that the German worker would rise if bombed by the Allies.

RG: It has to be remembered that bombings of Italian industrial centers led to revolts against Mussolini, and many hoped that bombing of German cities would lead to a similar effect. Unfortunately the effect was just the opposite. To alrge part probably because the fascisti had been in power for a decade longer than the Nazis, and Germans didn't have had as much time to grow as sick of them as the Italians were of Musssolini's regime.

I think a lot of writers are overly sensitive about delicate moral issues concerning the immolation of German cities - a sensitivity that grows with the time elapsed since the war and with emotional distance from a conflict that none of them had to risk their lives fighting. I identify with our people because they were the ones who had to risk their lives. Some say the bombings were ineffectual because they did not cause the Germans to surrender, and in fact caused them to become more (verbally) defiant. I think that's silly. What people say and what they actually feel are two different things.

The fact of the matter is that the bombings destroyed huge swathes of German infrastructure. (It is always cheaper to destroy something than to put it together). People may say they are invigorated by being made homeless or by losing all their family members, but most of human history would argue against that conclusion. People who are slaughtered in large numbers generally grow weaker and less able to resist - no matter what they say, they become, in a word, docile. The relatively peaceful aftermath in both postwar Germany and Japan point to that reality. Some have said that West Germans were docile because they were afraid of the alternative - being ruled by the Soviets. If that's the case, why were the East Germans so docile? (You might think they had nothing to lose). Because they were crushed, body and soul, by the shattering experiences of the war, a large part of which included aerial bombings that may have killed up to a million city-dwellers.

Zhang Fei, that was Churchill's expectation and I tend to agree with you that he predicted it correctly. I haven't found much that suggests he thought there would be major uprisings as a result of the bombing, but OTOH to reinforce Ralf's comment, the British did deliberately target working class neighborhoods in some cities.

I was born post WW-II of immigrant parents who were refugees from lands conquered by the Axis. I was recently in the company of an 82 year old veteran of the bombing campaign against Tokyo who was expressing remorse for his role in the war (he is not LLL, just a veteran, and his willingness to speak of these matters is only recent), and if you can believe this, I found myself lecturing him on the historical necessity of what he had done.

My main points were that 1) the Nazis along with their allies in Imperial Japan represented a philosophy, a set of principles, and a demonstrated set of actions that rose to the level of evil described in the parent post, 2) while the losses inflicted on his unit didn't compare with what they were inflicting on the enemy, he and his comrades were following orders issued by higher ups who had the big picture and knew of horrific combat losses and the maltreatment of Allied prisoners of war, 3) the bombing campaign against civilian areas arose more out of weakness than military strength and that if we had the military strength we would have spared those civilians, hence the emphasis on a strong military in the U.S..

He listened politely to what I had to say, but finished the discussion with "Well, we didn't have to drop the atom bomb -- we had them beat." With that, we sat silent and I thought it best to let a combat veteran have the last word as a measure of respect for what he did and for what I will never do.

That's a surprising anecdote Paul. My grandfather was stationed in India, waiting to be deployed for combat (he said to China), when the bomb was dropped. In my family, left or right, there is universal approval of Hiroshima, but particularly for those whose subsequent existance might have depended upon it.

So, to apply Walzer's reasoning to the War on Terror:

1. Nature of the threat

Nazism was an ultimate threat to everything decent in our lives, an ideology and a practice of domination so murderous, so degrading even to those who might survive, that the consequences of its final victory were literally beyond calculation, immeasurably awful.

There's no question that victory for the terrorists, whether it's defined simply as mass killings and destruction in western cities, or more broadly as global imposition of shariah law, would indeed be "immeasurably awful" either way.

But what means do they have at their disposal? Does the terrorist threat have a nuclear dimension now? Will it in the future? How soon? What about other WMD? How feasible is it? To what extent will some rogue nations help organizations like Al Qaeda? Or will they be forever confined to making novel use of ordinary things in attempts to cause mass casualty mayhem?

2. Imminence

It is not just that such a victory was frightening, but also that it seemed in those years very close...

How close is victory for Islamofascists? The Nazis were a few boats and planes away from invading Great Britain. The Islamofascists would seem have a much, much longer way to go, at least in terms of global success. But, it is also fair to say that a terrorist attack on the scale of Madrid, Bali, or even 9-11 could come at any time. We just don't know.

The fact is that 9-11 was bad enough, and the imminence of more of the same is great enough, that certain actions receive broad support - knocking off the Taliban, denying the terrorist base in Afghanistan, certain (but not all) domestic security measures, and keeping a wary eye on Iran, Syria, and North Korea.

But because we can't pin down exactly just how bad it could be - the nature of the threat - and because it is so hard to say just how close we are to certain scenarios - imminence - it's impossible to reach a broad consensus that we're in the kind of emergency that Walzer is talking about. Hence, the interminable debate over Iraq, the Patriot act, and other measures.

He's talking about an emergency where leaders are willing to committ what are normally considered criminal acts in order to avoid consequences that are immeasurably worse. Clearly, we're not there yet (unless you believe invading Iraq was criminal, and that the Bush administration and it's allies also felt that way but proceeded regardless). Consider, for example, the relatively uncontroversial invasion of Afghanistan. There, even so soon after 9-11, we weren't heading down the path of Dresden or Hiroshima. The rules of engagement, the force we committed, and the risks we accepted, clearly indicated that our leadership assigned some urgency to attaining the strategic goal there, but that goal was not an issue of national survival at that time.

One goal of the GWoT is, presumably, to avoid that level of emergency. That was one justifcation for the invasion of Iraq, and it's the driving force behind our efforts to head off nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea, etc. But it's possible, despite our best efforts (or perhaps, depending on how you see it, the lack of same), that a future US administration and it's allies will have to face an emergency on a similar scale that Churchill did.

Joe A: It is often regarded by navy personnel that MacArthur's plan to invade the Phillipines was pointless for the winning of the war against Japan ...

Part of the reason for it was to move the supply base away from Australia, to get away from Australian dock worker unions who were bottle-necking supply (and getting paid double-time to do it). If the invasion of Japan had been undertaken, a base in the Philippines would have been absolutely vital. So there was more to it than MacArthur's ego, big as that was.

Robin: I particularly don't think [Walzer]
disagrees with the decisions that were made, by and large, re: Dresden and the bombings of Japan.

I don't think he does either, but Walzer is honest enough to recognize these questions, which everyone (including liberals, including conservatives) tend to gloss over.

Take conventional bombing: Questions about the bombing of Tokyo and Dresden are very few, outside of WWII historians. The only liberal criticism I can think of is Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. I think there's a simple and unflattering reason for that: The liberal instinct in confronting such issues is to call the POTUS a murderer, and the POTUS was Saint FDR.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are a little different, and there is a sharp distinction between the liberal and leftist stances towards it.

The liberal stance is that the atomic bombs were necessary to prevent an even more costly invasion of Japan. Period, case closed. Most conservatives would agree - (I don't quite, but that's another story).

The leftist stance is that the atomic bombs are just another example of the generic and all-consuming evil of the US. Period, case closed. The issues surrounding the decision to use them do not interest the left in the slightest.

As an example, I was reading recently about a History professor who found out that two of his grad students had told his class that the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan instead of Germany because of racism.

When he told the grad students that Germany had already surrendered unconditionally, they were not the least bit impressed. They didn't see why that made any difference at all. Needless to say, the professor wound up facing a charge of racism ...

We could have avoided dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sure. But the alternatives are horrifying, and when you're talking about "worse than nuking two cities", you're talking real horror:

- We could have invaded one of the Japanese islands. Estimated casualties, in American forces alone, would have been a quarter of a million. The Japanese had a few thousand suicide planes ready for the invasion as well. Granted, they were flown by untrained pilots and the US had gained some experience in dealing with kamikaze attack, but at the same time it's a lot easier to find an invasion fleet right off shore than it is to find a small Pacific island. The Japanese government had, by this time, drafted the entire civilian population into defense battalions, armed with anything from explosive satchels for use against tanks to sharpened bamboo stakes. There's also the experience of Saipan to consider, where the majority of a thousand Japanese civilians committed suicide rather than be "captured" by American forces. Any military offensive under those circumstances would have been very, very close to an extermination campaign...

From a military perspective, the Japanese response to the American invasion would have shot their wad - they had committed final reserves and cannibalized their training program. But it was intended to inflict horrific casualties on the American invasion force, at which point the US would be amenable to peace negotiations of the "we're not actually surrendering" variety.

- We could have just strangled Japan slowly. The air campaign gutted a large percentage of most of the major Japanese cities. The harbors and sea passages that were critical to inter-island transportation were mined thoroughly. We worked over the remaining road and rail links as well. Oil was practically unavailable; naval interdiction essentially cut off Japan from its oil supply.

Japan was, to put it simply, starving. It wasn't really self-sufficient to start with, it couldn't import nearly enough food, and what food there was, couldn't be moved to the areas where it was needed. The Japanese government was more than a little worried about domestic insurrection caused by privation.

Actually defeating Japan through this method would have required continuing the chokehold, if you will, until those worries bore fruit. That would have taken months, if not years, in which millions of civilians would starve. It also would have opened up the specter of civil war, which could have been disastrous. Remember that Japan still had a lot of overseas holdings at the end of the war, garrisons that were isolated but too tough to have knocked out. Without a central government that could order those units to surrender, the war could have gone on for years more, crushing every island that still held out.

Also toss in the Soviet Union. They launched an attack against Japanese holdings in Manchuria and Korea just before the atomic bombs, and actually attempted a landing on Hokkaido, with the intention of partitioning Japan as was done to Germany.

Even if you ignore US combat losses (which, incidentally, we should not do!), under either alternative, millions of Japanese would have died. Total casualties from the atomic bombs were well under 200,000, even counting cancer deaths from radiation.

Yes, it's terrible when you have to make decisions in terms of tremendous piles of dead civilians. And there's plenty of reason for wishing that things hadn't had to turn out that way. But if we look at it carefully, it really is fortunate that they did...

The liberal stance is that the atomic bombs were necessary to prevent an even more costly invasion of Japan. Period, case closed. Most conservatives would agree - (I don't quite, but that's another story).

You've got my curiosity piqued, Glen. Tell us more...

Avatar -

You're right to point out that besieging Japan was an obvious alternative to invasion. You're also right in pointing out the objections to this - a blockade could easily have killed more Japanese than both atomic bombs did. American lives would have been lost as well (though not nearly as many as in an invasion) because the Japanese were quite ingenious at suicide attacks even though they were militarily defeated by then.

Letting millions of defiant Japanese starve themselves to death would not have carried the potent symbolism that Fat Man and Little Boy did. There would have been no outcry over the deaths of millions of civilians - not then, and not now. Not even from the Japanese.

Compare the hysteria over the relatively miniscule toll of human life in Iraq, even though it has already produced positive results.

There's a lesson there - even the (very few) leftists who believe their own preposterous exaggerations of deaths in Iraq are not really concerned with the moral question of lesser or greater evils. The symbolism of the US invasion, flying in the face of European and leftist opinion, is far more important to them. Avoiding alleged complicity with evil is seemingly more important than preventing evil itself. Better that Saddam Hussein should enslave and murder all Iraqis than that the US should kill some of them - even by accident. Even in pursuit of a greater good.

"But ... war is not always a struggle over ultimate values, where the victory of one side would be a human disaster for the other."

The problem being that many times once the nature and the scope of the threat is established, it is too late.

"It is necessary to be skeptical about such matters, to cultivate a wary disbelief of wartime rhetoric, and then to search for some touchstone against which arguments about extremity might be judged ..."

Truly said.

"Nazism lies at the outer limits of exigency, at a point where we are likely to find ourselves united in fear and abhorrence."

As pointed out, this was never universally recognized and not even widely recognized until well into the war. These are arguments made in hindsight and safety. Just as often witnesses of violent crime have bad and even inaccurate memories of details, how can we not expect nations in mortal danger to have similar experiences?

Once war reaches a threshold where it its continuation is the ultimate evil, whatever is done to hasten victory is moral. The problem is judging that point.

Yes, Mark - that's the tension here, isn't it? And it's what I meant about leadership ... Churchill had a lot of opposition, but he kept pushing because he had a clear vision of the threat - one that others didn't see or didn't see all of or got bogged down about when they tried to hold onto good traditions that couldn't cope with the Nazi threat.

But Walzer's also right that we should be cautious, because there certainly have been and no doubt will be future demogogues who will try to create an overaching threat where none exists (except for their ambition).

One reason I love the serious part of the blogosphere is that it helps us avoid the latter and see the former clearly.

So, can we still think of the Civil War as a just war? No great emergency. The South wasn't going to overwhelm the North and impose an evil regime. Was there an excuse for Sherman's tactics? I happen to think there was. I think we need to be supremely tolerant of others. We should bend over backwards to make excuses for them, but there comes a time when something has to be labeled as evil. When the evil is clear, whether it is contained or not, we must commit ourselves to ending it, using all necessary force commensurate with the evil.