Joe Obenberger |
06-12-2012 03:50 PM |
Does anyone think that President Abraham Lincoln would have hesitated to use attack helicopters to preserve the Union, had they been available? His Army brought every technology of the age into battle, usually the first military use of any of them, from telegraph and observation balloons to submarines and iron clad ships of war. Much of the strategy of the North involved blockades of civilian population and the destruction of agriculture and animal husbandry with the intent to so assault the civilian population as to demoralize the people in secession, witness the wholesale destruction inflicted by Sherman's Army, the burning of Atlanta, etc. We never abandoned making war against civilian populations. The firebombing of Tokyo and Hamburg and Dresden are well known, as is the return of British fighters to Dresden to machine gun the firemen a couple of hours after the incindiaries created the firestorm. For two years I lived in a city - Stuttgart - in which 82% of the civilian housing had been destroyed in a handful of US raids aimed at striking terror into the civilians, along with too many women and children to ever count. The bombing of dikes and dams in Vietnam, flooding small villages in which children slept, seemed so ordinary at the time that it scarcely made news here. Given our own history - and the arguments we've used for one hundred fifty years to justify the same results, even when they were intended and not merely "collateral damage", I find some of the positions of our government regarding Syria's attempt to maintain law and order against insurrection to be very strange and incongruous.
|