FDR's biggest mistake

[LBJer]

9. Good thing. Or well, maybe not "good" as war is hell, but a justified and necessary thing.

To suggest that the burning alive of perhaps 100,000 civilians--men, women, and children--was in any way a "good" thing is an obscenity of the first order.  If the shoe had been on the other foot and Japan (or Germany) did the same thing to the U.S., we would likely view it as a war crime even if, in that alternative scenario, it had been us who started the war.

It's not even clear that it was "justified and necessary."

[LBJer]

9. Good thing. Or well, maybe not "good" as war is hell, but a justified and necessary thing.

To suggest that the burning alive of perhaps 100,000 civilians--men, women, and children--was in any way a "good" thing is an obscenity of the first order.  If the shoe had been on the other foot and Japan (or Germany) did the same thing to the U.S., we would likely view it as a war crime even if, in that alternative scenario, it had been us who started the war.

It's not even clear that it was "justified and necessary."

I personally met WW2 pacific theater veterans who saw their comrades' corpses mutilated, blown up with grenades as they tended to the wounded enemy, and were indeed burned alive and worse. Most of George HW Bush's comrades were literally eaten. Try telling these vets it wasn't "justified and necessary" to take out Tokyo. Breaking the enemy's will and ability to continue to fight, especially such an evil and brutal and aggressive enemy, is absolutely necessary.

And I clarified already it wasn't really "good." But war is hell, especially total war. The Japanese were the aggressors who started the war by invading China and forcing parents to rape their own daughters at gunpoint and impaling babies on bayonets. I sympathize with the civilians who did NOT support this barbarism, but I do not sympathize with the Imperial Japanese state at all. And its seat of government was Tokyo, which made it a legitimate military target even if it was unfortunately densely populated with civilians.

Sorry, it's not enough to point to Japanese atrocities to justify U.S. or other Allied actions.  Even if they CAN be justified, you have to make your case on other grounds (e.g., that it was truly necessary to end the war and at least likely prevent more deaths and suffering than it caused).  And you can use "breaking the enemy's will" to justify practically anything.  Would Iraqis have been justified in exploding a nuclear device in D.C. or New York to break Americans' will to continue fighting there?  After all, the U.S. started that war.