Of course Iranians will respond to any sneak attack in much the way we did to Pearl Harbor. But suppose Abrams got his way and the Mullahs were overthrown. Iran like Iraq is a country with deep regional/ethnic divisions. What would happen if Iran degenerated into a similar morass as did Iraq? Who would then put the pieces back together? Who but the Persians would be the centerpiece around which we would have to recreate Iran? And it is the Persian majority that Abrams wants to bomb and depose.

Goodness, remember what happened to Susan Sontag when she dared to broach that topic.

Frankly, I think the mentality behind bombing and the mentality behind torture are similar. Both are criminal, neither is effective, but both offer quick, easy, violent “solutions” that apparently have a direct appeal to the more primitive parts of the brain — or should I say, to the evil parts of the soul.

The “examples” don’t have to be historically accurate. Look at how the experience of rebuilding post-war Germany was used to support the invasion of Iraq. It was not only used before the war, but also well into the summer of 2003, when people like Rice were comparing the virtually non-existent resistance in post-war Germany to the obviously more sophisticated and deadly Sunni insurgency.

Again, I don’t think we disagree very significantly here. I’d just say that, even though you’re right that there may be an underlying motivation to just punish and humiliate real and imagined enemies, I doubt that very many people are consciously aware of their motives. People like Abrams are probably genuinely convinced, even in the face of the evidence, that the violence they advocate serves a constructive purpose.

He is boasting about the limited and targeted nature of the bombings, but according to the AFWC this will be completely useless. Indeed, an implicit part of the AFWC is that anything less than the mass bombing of civilian population centers is ineffective and weak. Of course, the mass bombing of Japanese cities had been going on for many months before the nukes were used, and this seemed to have no real political effect. More to the point, when the decision to surrender came, it did not come from popular protests, but came from within the government. Even amid the most horrific and unlimited bombing campaigns in history, the population did not turn against their government.

I suppose that one could engage in a pattern of bombings that showed such a determination to annihilate an entire people one city after another that they would rise up against their government to force a settlement, but the grotesque evil of such a policy would be so great that I find it hard to imagine anyone proposing it. (Perhaps this is a case where my imagination is not active enough.) Then again, the Japanese surrender after the second nuke suggests that the basic premise of the rationalization for using the nukes–the Japanese government intended to fight to the death–was false from the beginning.

Not if you’re a captive of ideology. For a while pro-war pundits were arguing that things weren’t going well in Iraq because we were being insufficiently ruthless with Sunni insurgents and Sunnis in general. A few people argued that if we’d handled the initial invasion the same way we handled the fight against Nazi Germany then the population would have been sufficiently demoralized and terrified and ready to submit to American instructions.

The same “logic” applies to continually advocating the aerial bombardment of various enemy countries. There’s a pretty solid argument that incinerating most of Japan’s cities and then demolishing two more with atomic weapons shortened World War II in the Pacific. So anytime air power fails to achieve the desired result–well, it’s just that we don’t have the balls to fight an air war the way we did in the 1940s.

Not that I’m disagreeing with anything in your post, necessarily–I just think it’s important to keep in mind that once someone has subscribed to a particular worldview it’s often difficult or impossible to sway them with real-world examples and evidence.