"Somalia" With regret, I have some experience with this. I am afraid I must disagree with you in a sense. Africa is a truly traumatized place -- things are rarely what they seem. I was special advisor to the UN on African famine relief in Ethiopia in my 'youth'. All I can say is, what a tragic mess.
The US has tended to be most effective when serving vital national interest -- read this to mean when business interests of major concern are at stake like oil supply. US foreign policy has issues more swampy than the everglades -- and it is tough to wade through them all -- but no matter what swamp you enter, you do not end up with a justifcation for mass murder. Mass murder is mass murder. You don't say "oh yes. That mass murder was justified". I have a slight problem with bombing of Hiroshima on that score -- and you need to go there and have a look around to understand this point. The big one was dropped right over a church next to a park -- and the church was ground zero. Nukes blasts spread 'better' when triggered in the air, and the big one was exploded 200 feet above the church -- the church was all that was left afterwards because of the blast pattern. It is an extraordinary sight. It was a holiday and 10,000 children were playing in the park for a school 'events day'. They were turned to small piles of ash. The ashes of the 10,000 children were later collected, scraped out of the grass, and put in a pile which is the size of a small hill. It is a memorial now with grass on top and a plaque -- and if you visit this grassy hill and are if you are not moved, well frankly there is something wrong with you. It was mass murder. It saved millions of lives indirectly, and the power of the bomb needed to be demonstrated, but there must have been someplace else to make the point -- unless the point was that we were willing to kill every freaking man woman and child by frying them to ashes -- Hiroshima was not a significant military site. The fire bombing of Tokyo actually killed more people, and the fires were another horror beyond belief in the tinderbox of wood and paper houses -- hundreds of thousand of women and children could be killed in a single night of fire bombing -- try to imagine hell on earth -- it was worse. Burned alive -- no place to run. Babies, small children, mothers. Old people. They all burned the same way. Mass murder is mass murder. We should ALWAYS condemn mass murder. |
