Don’t Know Much About History…

Is DNI Gabbard wrong to worry about nuclear weapons?

As a policy issue, the threat that nuclear weapons pose to the fate of the planet too often finds itself on the back burner here in Washington, relegated to the province of specialists and peace activists, rarely capturing the attention of the mainstream media.

The unjustified and illegal Israeli sneak attack on Iran (a country which, unlike Israel, is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has every right under international law to enrich uranium), ought to set off alarm bells for those who think the risk of nuclear catastrophe is either overblown or so remote as to be essentially non-existent.

Pakistan’s vow to stand behind Iran now brings the nuclear powers involved in Israel’s latest war to four: The US, Israel, Pakistan and Britain, which is reportedly scrambling jets to the Middle East in order to “defend” Israel.

Only days prior to the Israeli attack, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard found herself again at the center of a coordinated media attack by Washington’s neoconservatives who never tire of smearing those with whom they disagree.

In this instance the topic was nuclear weapons.

A suddenly influential neocon media outlet that goes by the name of Jewish Insider decided to stir up controversy last week after Gabbard released a video on social media in which she spoke about her recent trip to Hiroshima and expressed her concern that,

Political elite and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.”

Upon the video’s release, JI cub reporters scurried up to Capitol Hill to garner reactions from the least impressive members of the US Senate, including Maine's Susan Collins and the ever-glib John Kennedy of Louisiana who sneered, “She [Gabbard] obviously needs to change her meds.” And Kennedy perhaps needs to pick up a history book (though I suspect the problem is that in Louisiana, the Bible counts as one).

The authors of the piece, Gabby Deutsch and Emily Jacobs, who falsely claim the Hiroshima bomb “spurred a Japanese surrender” (actually the Soviet entry into the war against Japan did that) could, like Kennedy, do with some remedial history.

And so, for the scores of young neocon propagandists running around Washington who have never heard a shot fired in anger, a quick history lesson:

General Dwight D. Eisenhower recalled what he thought when informed by Secretary of War Henry Stimson that Truman had decided to drop the bomb,

...During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.”

Five-star Navy admiral William Leahy who served as FDR and Truman’s chief of staff felt,

[T]he use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. . . . [I]n being the first to use it, we . . . adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”

Two weeks after the bombing, General Curtis LeMay publicly criticized the decision, saying,

The war would have been over in two weeks. . . . The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”

The military historian Major General JFC Fuller has written that,

Though to save life is laudable, it in no way justifies the employment of means which run counter to every precept of humanity and the customs of war. Should it do so, then, on the pretext of shortening a war and of saving lives, every imaginable atrocity can be justified.”

The Paulist priest Father James Gillis condemned the bombings as,

…the most powerful blow ever delivered against Christian civilization and the moral law.

Conservative philosopher Richard Weaver likewise believed that.

…The spectacle of young boys fresh out of Kansas and Texas turning nonmilitary Dresden into a holocaust…pulverizing ancient shrines like Monte Cassino and Nuremberg, and bringing atomic annihilation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki [was] inimical to the foundations on which civilization is build.”

But what do they know compared with such eminences as Senators Kennedy, Collins and the members of Netanyahu Youth at JI?

James W. Carden is editor of TRR.