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Politics : The Castle -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Philosopher who wrote (2548)	1/29/2004 7:54:09 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7936

If the US had today's nuclear arsenal back in 1944 would it be ok to try and kill everyone in Germany and Japan? That's precisely what the atomic bomb drops were for. No, they where to kill many thousands of Japanese and shock millions, not to kill millions. Arguably it saved Japanese lives. Dropping 1000 megatons on Japan at the end of WWII would not have saved lives. I do wonder what would happen if Israel followed an equivalent policy now wrt Palestine. Not using atomic weapons, of course, that would be stupid so close to their borders. But a few daisy cutter bombs on the refugee camps, and what? I think they would have to kill at least tens maybe hundreds of thousands to make the others run away or surrender. The problem is a lot would run away and still be able to strike occasionally from Jordan and Syria and Egypt. Many non-Palestinian Arabs see Israel as an enemy and this would even be more true if Israel used such tactics, and there are just to many Arabs for Israel to control them. OTOH that is the kind of strategy that Arab dictators have used against unruly populations and often it has worked for them. I suppose theoretically it could work for Israel but in practice it probably would not work out well. I think Israel would have to show that it is as brutal as some of the more brutal Arab dictators for naked force to work, and it would have to stay that brutal over time. That would cause it to lose support from the US and it wouldn't totally stop the problem of terrorism because Israel is a small country surrounded by a sea of hostile states. So even if morality is dropped as an issue (something I might do in a hypothetical discussion but not usually something that I would recommend doing in reality) it still might not be such a good idea. Tim