Was the bombing of Japan justifed?

[Vulgotha]

LMAO I said "Hojo" wow. Def in Final Fantasy VII mode there.

Pardon that guys, I meant "Tojo".

I've never said the Japanese were right, besides the op asked about the Hiroshima/Nagasaki incident.

If you want to change the subject... Vietnam? Iraq(WMD)? Oh, wait...


Anyways, I stand by what I said. It was wrong. I wish they(all countries involved, especially the U.S.) had fought like men, keeping civilian casualties to a minimum.

Yea, see, I have no idea what you're trying to get at here. We fought Vietnam to contain Communist influence (same with the Korean War). If anything we refused to actually fight that war in the manner which it should have been waged- instead we engaged in 'containment'. We lost our resolve to win that war due to our failure to commit from the start.

But I'm not entirely sure where exactly you're going with that tangent.

As for Iraq- there were WMD's. Saddam had them. Do you know how I know that? Because us, Israel, UK, Pakistan (and others) gave them tons of weapons to try and take out Iran. The external powers had a very large hand to play in his development and acquisition of WMD's.

Why? Because it was a game of chess. That's what war is, really. Politics. A big game of chess.

To this day I'm not entirely clear what motivated us to invade Iraq. Perhaps there was no single reason. But I wouldn't call that a war fraught with the intentional slaughter of civilians. It has certainly happened, and in large numbers, but this has more to do with the nature of the asymmetrical war in which we find ourselves in- while we use conventional military tactics. It being messy was inevitable.

I don't think we should have invaded though. Pointless, and it further destabilized the region. We didn't gain enough out of it.

I'm displeased with how we've acted militarily in the past half a century because we keep on fighting the same damn war. We're perpetually stuck in WW2 mode just with fancier toys. It's not how wars are fought anymore. That and we also fail to commit to anything we do anymore, leading to more bungling.


@Keefy

Retribution. To canonize and legitimize the victory and the enemy's defeat on the world stage. That having been said, the Japanese and Nazis weren't the paragons of military ethics.

But the trials were a sham anyway. (Read: We let Hirohito walk and intentionally held others accountable when they weren't).

[Bigdoggy]

this discussion is so "damned if you do and damned if you don't". lol