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[QUOTE]Originally posted by David Sands: [QB] Sol: and that seems to be where the disagreement lies. Prudential judgments and practical reasons fraught with this much risk are seldom not contentious. Liam: I've been doing some reading lately in Just War Theory and I've seen that example bandied about both ways. I personally think it's a difficult case to make according to [i]jus in bello[/i]. Specifically, the principle of discrimination. It turns on what degree the civilians in those cities were combatants. If I remember correctly, many of those civilians were being trained in basic hand to hand combat to resist an invasion. However, even were that true, I think the case narrowly fails because there were people in those towns too old, too young, or too crippled to fight, and the law of war says those who can not resist should not be assaulted. No argument on that principle from me. However, my statement wasn't meant as a moral endorsement of the decisions. It was meant as a statement of counterhistorical probability. My reading of what was going on in the Imperial Palace indicates that using the devices removed the will to fight of Hirohito who set in motion the surrender. It's a ongoing debate, though, whether the half million who died or were injured would have been a lower figure than the collective casualties that the two sides would have sustained in Operations Olympic and Coronet. (Estimates range from 50,000 to 2 million. But the invasions would have involved more men than Normandy for comparison.) It's counterfactual, so it's necessarily speculative. The probability weighs in favor of one side in my view, but that's why I qualified my statement with "probably." I don't know. Jason: my response would be that they've had a peaceful election in Afghanistan, and [URL=http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005771]the[/URL] [URL=http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005398]country[/URL] [URL=http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005512]is[/URL] [URL=http://opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005642]steadily improving[/URL]. Rome wasn't built in a day. But waiting until we were completely done bringing one country up to modern industrialized standards before moving onto the next would slow the process down to a glacial pace. Allow me to put something else out here. [URL=http://www.policyreview.org/apr03/kurtz.html]This article by Stanley Kurtz[/URL] puts out what he think is an example more analogous to Afghanistan and Iraq than the post-WW2 reconstruction of Germany and Japan. Anyone else have opinions on it? [/QB][/QUOTE]
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