March 30, 2015 Editor

Who Are the War Criminals?

030325-D-9880W-079
President George W. Bush (right) announces his $74.7 billion wartime supplemental budget request in the Pentagon on March 25, 2003, as Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld (center) and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz look on.  Bush visited the Pentagon to meet with the senior defense leadership and to announce the supplemental request which, once appropriated by Congress, will pay for the direct costs of the Iraqi conflict and the global war against terror.  DoD photo by R.D. Ward.  (Released)

WN: Another now-and-then article.

An excerpt:

In Errol Morris’ 2003 film, The Fog of War, former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, architect of the Vietnam War strategy, reminisces on lessons learned from his life, organized by Morris around issues of war. At one point, some detail has been gone into about the military campaign against Japan headed by General Curtis LeMay, directly under whom McNamara served. That was after he had initiated incendiary bombing in Germany, where in Dresden alone on February 14 & 15, 1945, 100,000 civilians lost their lives; and in over 40 other German cities, there were about 1,000,000 civilian casualties. This unconscionable barbarity was repeated in Tokyo, March 9 and 10, 1945 with a similar casualty toll to Dresden. LeMay chortled (though mistakenly about the death toll) that

. . . we scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

Such atrocities were subsequently perpetrated against 66 Japanese cities with about 800,000 civilian casualties (more than all Japanese military combined), and culminated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a death toll alone of over 200,000 civilians. (After Hiroshima, President Truman, a Baptist Sunday School teacher, declared the nuclear bomb “the greatest thing in history.” Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King expressed relief that the bomb had been dropped on Asiatic people, not on “white races” in Europe.)

Please click on: Who Are the War Criminals?

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Editor

Wayne Northey was Director of Man-to-Man/Woman-to-Woman – Restorative Christian Ministries (M2/W2) in British Columbia, Canada from 1998 to 2014, when he retired. He has been active in the criminal justice arena and a keen promoter of Restorative Justice since 1974. He has published widely on peacemaking and justice themes. You will find more about that on this website: a work in progress.

Always appreciate constructive feedback! Thanks.