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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (48506)	10/1/2002 11:24:15 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Britain and the US carpetbombed French cities where it was believe German troops were seeking shelter. Interesting, Hawkmoon. I was just reading about our use of Bombers for D-Day, in Cohen's book. The Generals wanted to carpet bomb French Marshalling yards to stop all trains, but Churchill, et al, were concerned about French casualties. They finally came up with an acceptable number, and Bomber Command had to send in a daily tally on French Civilian Casualties. It was much lower than the Generals wanted. I have not read of any carpetbombing of French Cities in the manner you cite. We took out the German ones, thats for sure!

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (48506)	10/1/2002 11:36:04 AM
From: aladin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hawk, I like a lot of what you say, but in fairness (since I bug JohnM on this) I need to go after your carpet bombing comment. That was then, this is now. We did not have the technology then to focus only on German military and industrial targets (which were also integrated into highly populated regions). We might as well blame the English and French for using chemical weapons - they poured boiling oil on their enemies when their castles were under siege :-) John

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (48506)	10/1/2002 8:01:08 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Hawkmoon; Your comparison (between US / British actions during WW2 with Israeli / British actions against the PLO / IRA) is silly because in the first case, you have a war, and in the second case, you have only a disturbance of the peace. To put this into perspective, simply count up the casualties, on a per-capita or total basis either way, for the wars you're comparing. You're looking at apples and oranges. There are different levels of violence in international relations. In "full scale war" everything goes. In "limited conflict", like the Vietnam or Korean wars, the participants play the game under some set of limiting rules. If the guys get too much out of hand, the situation progresses to "full scale war". But the Irish and Israeli problems are not even "limited war". Instead, they are merely disturbances of the peace, and are only a few stages over "riot". The things which countries can get away with (in terms of international sanctions and all that) during wartime are not identical to the things that they can get away with during limited war or during "disturbances of the peace". But none of this really matters. The fact is that the Israelis have been unable to prevent the Palestinians from disturbing the peace. Call it whatever you like. Moan about the unfairness of it all as much as you have to. The fact is that the Israelis have failed. -- Carl