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The Guy Who Unknowingly 'Live-Blogged' the Bin Laden Raid
netbuzz (955038) writes "Three years ago today, software consultant Sohaib Athar was working on his laptop at home in Pakistan when he tweeted: 'Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).' And then: 'A huge window-shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope it's not the start of something nasty :-S.' It was for Osama bin Laden. Today Athar says, 'People do bring it up every now and then.'"
The man who effectively declared war on the USA by murdering 1/50th the amount of 'innocent' civilians as the USA did in Japan 66 years prior.
I really, really, hate people who point to the atomic bombings as proof that America is evil. The only way you can even remotely make that claim is by ignoring every reality of war and by using your modern knowledge of how things *did* happen to damn those who had to make the decision without the benefit of knowing how it turns out.
Believe it or not, there are often things that are justifiable in a war that would otherwise be unthinkable.
War - total war, on the scale of nations - is a constant question of choosing the lesser evil. There are very rarely good options to take - if there were, there would not have been a war in the first place.
We haven't had a war like that since WW2, so I suppose it's excusable that people forget just how much death and destruction it causes. The numbers can be a bit hard to wrap your head around, after all.
The two atomic bombings killed a quarter million people. On its own, that's horrifying. In the context of the Second World War, that's a rounding error. Some countries were literally decimated - over ten percent of their prewar population dead. Compared to Germany, Japan got off light.
Let's look at the alternative to the A-bombs. Japan was not going to surrender - even after losing Manchuria to the Soviets, they were still ready to fight. So we were looking at an invasion - and after Iwo Jima, we knew it would not be an easy fight. Estimated Allied killed were in the hundreds of thousands to millions - Japanese casualties, military and civilian, are incalculable, particularly since the plans that did not involve nuclear weapons generally involved chemical weapons in their stead. Some plans involved both, on top of the more mundane horrors of a million-man invasion force. Oh, and if you delay it too long, the Soviets will probably invade, and they barely cared about their own casualties, much less enemy noncombatants.
There *was* no good option there. Japan was going to get pounded. The least evil option was whichever one ended the war fastest - and that option is using whatever weapons you have available to force your opponent to surrender. If that means firebombing cities, so be it. If that means atomic bombs, so be it. Because if you hold back, all you're doing is making the war last longer, which means not only do more of your own people die, but in the long run, more of theirs do too.
There are plenty of justifiable ways to claim that America is evil - pretty much anything done in the past decade counts, really. You don't need to make shit up about the atomic bombings in order to wedge it into an unrelated argument.
PS: Hiroshima was a major military city during 1945, with both a major command center, as well as a supply hub and munitions stockpile. Nagasaki was a major munitions industrial center. Calling them "innocent civilians" is at best misinformed.
I add the following for your consideration.
After dropping those two bombs, nobody on Earth has ever dropped one since. Think about that for a second. Yes, they have been tested, but never once dropped in anger since the first two. And all nuclear-capable countries between the 50s and the 80s have had was at some point to consider using them. All of them treated them as retaliation weapons, only to be used if they were shot at first.
So let us treat Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the ignorant first use of an unknown technology that it was and accept that the world went through a massive, rapid learning curve and HAVE NOT USED THEM SINCE.
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