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

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (244690)	10/11/2007 1:51:03 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Face facts. The American/Japanese war was won because we had a better war machine. The Japanese were fantastic soldiers who fought to the death again and again, even when outnumbered and living in the most miserable conditions imaginable. Our going "tit for tat" didn't give them an "incentive" to follow the rules and it didn't discourage their willingness to act in extreme brutality. We simply demeaned ourselves by mirroring their atrocities and by so doing we failed to live up to deeply held American standards. This is both true and false, and your conclusion is unwarranted. It is true that in the case of the Japanese, they were until near the end so ideologically committed to fighting to extinction that going tit for tat did not incent them to treat American prisoners better. However, it does not follow, that had the Americans determined to follow your "no brutality" rules, they could not have crippled their own war machine badly, to the point where it would not have won. First, they could have failed to finish off Japanese resistance in many places by being unwilling to exterminate the Japanese fighters. Second, they could have lost many US Soldiers to the tricks of Japanese soldiers feigning surrender. Third, by valuing the lives of Japanese civilians very highly, they could have provided Japanese soldiers with a splendid opportunity for using human shields. Forth, they could have extended the war indefinitely by leaving the home islands essentially untouched by not bombing civilians. If you think that the Japanese wouldn't have noticed American efforts at scrupulous non-brutality, and taken full advantage of them in the ways listed above, think again. The Pacific War was a close-run thing as it actually played out. American victory was not predetermined, and the American public was very weary after four years of war and horrific casualties. If the war had gone on for another year, with hundreds of thousands of further American casualties, you would likely have seen real demands for a negotiated end to it.