Robert S. McNamara, U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, argued in The Fog of War that WWII firebombing of Japanese cities and dropping atomic bombs were "not proportional to the objectives [the U.S. was] trying to achieve". This was a tremendous amount of damage and killing in terms of what the US was actually trying to achieve. The US went so far as for the U.S. Air Force General LeMay to argue that they would have been convicted as war criminals if they lost the war. I believe that proportionality should definitely be a guideline in war. The massive casualties and destruction that are a part of war are bad enough; there shouldn't be more death and destruction than there has to be. Yes, sometimes countries have to go to war to solve problems and sometimes they need to take extreme measures to win, but they need not go farther than they have to, that is, they should keep their actions proportional to their mission. This lesson was clearly not followed in WWII. Like McNamara said, the US killed 50-90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was obviously way more extensive damage than was really necessary and so it was not proportional. McNamara and LeMay would have been prosecuted as war criminals if we had lost, but should they have been, even though we won? It doesn’t make sense to prosecute the winning generals, “heroes” of the war, but what they did was bad enough that they deserved it.
You’d think we would have learned our lesson from that, but we are still not being proportional today with the war in Iraq. I believe we have overextended our stay; a few years after the Hussein regime was toppled we are still there interfering. We say we are trying to reconstruct Iraq and stop insurgencies and such, yet we are bombing Baghdad. I believe the bombing and who-knows-what-else our soldiers are doing in Iraq is not proportional to our objective of helping and reconstructing Iraq.
3 comments:
You took the words right out of my mouth. There shouldn't be proportional death. If so I thing the equation isn't complete without McNamara going through the same thing those people did.
I totally agree that proportionality should be considered in warfare. Though, I at times I wonder if it is necessary to ignore it in extreme cases. How does one decide when though?
With the whole Iraq war, I disagree with what you stated. I think we are using proportionality in the war. Leaving before things are settled is like quiting on the job, and that's not what the U.S. is about.
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