WUI (Writing under the influence)

The difference between the right and the left, in general, is that we are open to consider certain morbid calculi. If we know or are sure, with good amount of certainty, that by killing a few lives now we can save countless lives later, we will entertain options the left will almost always reject. The WSJ editorial today makes this point while comparing popular opinions and attitudes of 1945 and 2005:

In 1945, Paul Fussell was a 21-year-old second lieutenant who'd spent much of the previous year fighting his way through Europe. At the time of Hiroshima, he was scheduled to participate in the invasion of the Japanese mainland, for which the Truman Administration anticipated casualties of between 200,000 and one million Allied soldiers. No surprise, then, that when news of the bomb reached Lt. Fussell and his men, they had no misgivings about its use:

"We learned to our astonishment that we would not be obliged in a few months to rush up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being machine-gunned, mortared, and shelled, and for all the practiced phlegm of our tough facades we broke down and cried with relief and joy. We were going to live."

Mr. Fussell was writing about American lives. What about Japanese lives? The Japanese army was expected to fight to the last man, as it had during the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Since the ratio of Japanese to American combat fatalities ran about four to one, a mainland invasion could have resulted in millions of Japanese deaths--and that's not counting civilians. The March 1945 Tokyo fire raid killed about 100,000; such raids would have intensified had the war dragged on. The collective toll from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings is estimated at between 110,000 and 200,000.

I'm pretty sure that repeating Hiroshima today would be almost impossible. Europeans would probably prefer to die rather than to retaliate or defend themselves in this drastic way. Americans, depending on who was in charge, would probably be willing, with good amount of leadership, to pull the trigger sooner rather than later but it would, in all likelihood, be an act of desperation rather than cool calculus our predecessors made in 1945.

This is why I support our aggressive foreign policy since 9/11. Anything more would not be acceptable to the majority of Americans but anything less would eventually force us to that act of desperation when it would be too late to do us any good and when it would cause even more damage.