A great history lesson

Cossetted idiots have been blathering about war crimes a lot recently because three (yes 3) Al Quaeda big shots were waterboarded in order to cause them to talk about the plans and makeup of their organization. Most of the posturing is politically motivated; but there are actually some truly amazing idiots out there who think war is some kind of refereed sport whose rules can be neatly written down in a book like the rules for a baseball game. It simply isn't so, and it never will be so.

This moral backbiting game recently resulted in comedian John Stewart parrotting the increasingly but wrongly held idea that President Harry Truman's use of the atomic bombs against Japan was unnecessary and a war crime. The only thing nice that can be said about people who believe that is that they may deserve some leniency by reason of insanity or by virtue of lack of education about the attitudes of the leaders of Japan and the attitudes of a significant portion of the Japanese people during World War II.

Later John Stewart turned around and retracted his judgement of Harry Truman as a war criminal, probably because he was informed by his horrified writers and political commissars that Truman was a Democrat. He was probably also informed that Truman was the immediate successor to Franklin D. Roosevelt who is a Democratic Party Saint, in part because he ordered the development of the atomic bombs and the long range B29 bombers which Truman later used to drop them on Japan. The only reason Roosevelt himself didn't order the use of the atomic bombs was because they weren't ready before he died. You can be sure of that because Roosevelt never shrank from ordering the firebombing of cities, though, and the firebombing attacks killed many more people than the atomic bomb attacks.

Don't get me wrong here. I'm not attacking Roosevelt or Truman for those decisions. They were running this country during a war to the death. Based on lot of reading I think they prosecuted that war with reasonable competence and reasonable humanity given the nature of the times and the nature of the other combatant nations.

Here is a video takedown of the whole concept of the atomic bombing of Japan as a war crime. It's excellent.

http://www.pjtv.com/video/Afterburner_/The_True_Story_of_the_Atomic_Bombs/1808/