Kenya in Crisis

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Pierce, it seems you've missed the Hiroshima-Nagasaki calculus. It's all out there in Estimate Land, but roughly 225,000-250,000 deaths from those two strikes were the price of not taking an estimated one million casualties on the Allied side of the ledger alone, with approximately two to three million estimated for the Japanese. Concomitant general damage for Operation Olympic would have made Kyushu and Shikoku look like a giant rake had gone over those islands from one end to the other. Tokyo was hoping to stop a very experienced army whose every soldier had a semiauto rifle plus support weaponry of every description and complete air supremacy with war emergency manufactured matchlocks and bamboo spears. Such army as they had left had boltaction rifles, badly designed machine guns, and plane crashes by way of cruise missiles.

Any question what would have happened, or of the eventual outcome anyway? If you want to put it romantically, Hiroshima and Nagasaki died that Japan might live. It did take the Emperor Hirohito's word to convince Imperial Japan that it had suffered quite enough, but even so, one plane, one bomb, one city was easy math to do.

I'd say it's pretty well proven that we did save lives that way, simply enough by the shortening of the war.

If we are fighting people who are evil, who cares if we do something wrong? Frankly I do not, and I have trouble believing in the honesty of those who do. Inerrancy on our country's part is not something I'm going to expect -- though I might expect fewer errors from one group, contrasted with another. Wars have errors in them. The idea is to make the other poor dumb SOBs collapse under theirs. Patriotism may be the last refuge of the scoundrel, but one-note anti-Americanism is the first property of the moronic. I make a hobby of demonstrating my intellectual power before those who are absolutely desperate not to credit me with any. It's fun watching them squirm and choke down their just deserts, and watching the cherished delusions they thought were an adequate philosophy of life trickle away.