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/

Here's a wrinkle about Iran I hadn't thought about

This article about how we're about to sell a $7 Billion anti-missile system to The United Arab Emirates caught my eye. I've been so blinded by all the talk about Iran threatening Israel that I've tended to forget that an Iranian bomb also threatens a whole bunch of other people. Iranian Shiites may not hate Sunni Muslims quite as much as they hate Jews and Americans; but they hate them plenty much. There's going to be a lot of money in selling anti-missile systems to all the oil rich countries that are going to want to have a chance of stopping an Iranian missile. Figure on Kuwait and Saudi Arabia being next up to bat to pay several billion for such systems, and there is only one country that can supply them.

http://malaysia.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20080909/tbs-usa-uae-missile-7318940.html

It's nice that there's money to be made by our aerospace industry. But don't get me wrong. I think it will be a very, very bad day for the world if Iran manages to develop a nuclear weapon. And it will be an even worse day if Iran manages to develop compact nuclear weapons that can be delivered with ballistic missiles. Iran already has missiles which can reach the other oil producing states in the Middle East, and also Israel, which is "the little Satan" in the eyes of the Muslim fanatics who run Iran. And Iran is working on missiles able to reach most of Europe.

Note that this is not a panic thing. This is a long run risk thing. I'm no expert on these weapons; but I do know there is a big difference in difficulty between developing unwieldy two ton nuclear devices like the bombs dropped on Japan, and developing a few hundred pound device which is shaped to fit into a missile reentry nose cone. It took the U.S. and the Soviet Union several years and dozens of nuclear tests to develop reliable warheads for missiles. With more modern computers to do modelling and all the information that is out there in the public domain it will probably take Iran less time; but it will still take a couple of years minimum from the time of the first test explosion to the time they can have a short range missile ready to launch with a reliable warhead.

Figure at least a couple of years before Iran tests a bomb, then at least a couple more years before they can put a bomb on a short range missile, then at least a couple more years before they can put it on a medium range missile, say one that can reach Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, India, and a lot of other nearby countries. That means it's at least five or six years before things will get really dicey.

But five or six years isn't very long if you're thinking about how to defend against such missiles. Just installing and testing one of these anti-missile systems is probably a several year affair.