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To: zonder who wrote (6589)	2/4/2004 1:08:05 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 20773

One reason to limit the point to the last 20 years is that WMD have been used for millenia, but international law banning their use is fairly recent. The Romans spread salt over the fields of Carthage to make sure it could not be repopulate -- certainly in that context salt was a WMD. Arab tribes woudl drop dead animals down the wells in enemy terriory to poison their water supplies. Crusaders used to hurl dead and diseased animals over the walls of cities to try to impose plague and disease on the populations. In more modern times, mustard gas was widely used in WWI. There are many, many other instances of chemicals, diseases, etc. being used in warfare throughout human history. But international law in the past several decades has outlawed such practices. So if the question had been open ended and without restriction, obviously the answer would have been that there have been many such uses in the past. It would become a silly question; also, if one is going to use historical uses of WMD to justify their current usage, they could never be eliminated. And, if you look at the context of the post I was responding to Message 19760277 you will see that the issue was the difference between the invansion of Iraq and other US invasions of "undesirable dictatorial republics" in the past 20 years or so. So within that context of that discussion, it make perfect sense to limit the question. (Context does matter in these discussions, you know.) Now, do you know of any uses which fit the conditions I laid out in my post? There may be -- I don't know all of what went on in Cambodia under Pol Pot, in the Tutsi/Hutu troubles, etc. Which is why I posed it as a question. Which you are still free to answer under its terms and with an understanding of the context of the discussion.

To: zonder who wrote (6589)	2/4/2004 1:27:09 PM
From: Rainy_Day_Woman	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 20773

I have no idea how the entire rest of the world would qualify that - most countries can and do their best to justify their behavior - some justification is true and makes sense, some is just plain off the wall nonsense it is a stretch to compare things like Saddam gassing Kurds with America's decision to bring WWII to an end more quickly there is certainly room for moral argument about whether both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were "necessary" (as opposed to Hiroshima alone with a warning that cities would come next) - also, the number of people killed in those two bombings pales by comparison with other WWII era slaughters and finally, there is this - the U.S., having been attacked by Japan to begin with and savagely fought against by the Japanese for years in the Pacific, sought a way out of the war and when the bomb became functionable, my government choose to use it - nor do I think it can argued it saved more lives than it cost we then installed an enduring democracy in Japan, something the Japanese never had before - Japan has become an impressively productive democracy as well as a peace-loving nation based on a legal system that the U.S. installed in a decade-long occupation - centuries of Japanese warlords pillaging and raping the rest of Asia and the Pacific were brought to an end - Japan is now one of the most responsible members of the community of nations all brought about by American occupation, which, of course is viewed as bad thing in Iraq by the majority of the world today