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All wars kill innocents                                                                                    

Posted at: Mar/20/2024 : Posted by: Mel

Related Category: Politics & Gov, Watching America, World Watching,

If you have watched “Band of Brothers” on television, you may have noticed that it does not spend much time on the civilian casualties and regional destruction reaped on Germany and German occupied portions of Europe. Stephen Ambrose’s book and the mini-series production by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks instead focuses on the reality of war as seen and experienced by members of the E-Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division. The reason for this narrow focus is simple; in all wars innocents are killed and property is destroyed whether Germany, Japan or Gaza. But it is important to know that the people who start the wars bear that blame, not the people who finish them.

There are some moments in the Band of Brothers series when the viewer glimpses through the eyes of soldiers on the ground the utter devastation of the bombing by the 8th Airforce on first France and then Germany. There is little doubt that the German civilians of 1943-1945 thought of the U.S. Army Air Corps and the Royal Air Force as "terror bombers." Precision munitions had not been invented and the dumping of "dumb bombs" guided by gravity was how targets were destroyed.

Of particular note is the February 1945 firebombing of Dresden Germany. As a precursor, the surprise attack by Germans 2 months earlier in the Ardennes region of Belgium caught Allied leadership completely off guard. Ultimately, the U.S. force suffered 80,000 casualties (wounded, missing or killed) in that battle. 19,000 of those U.S. casualties were U.S. troops killed. A month after the Ardennes offensive was repelled, advancing Allied forces made the grim discovery of Auschwitz.

With Ardennes and Auschwitz still weighing heavily on the minds of Allied planners it was decided that Dresden needed to be destroyed to accelerate an end to the war in Europe. Dresden had virtually no war material manufacturing, but was a major rail and roadway hub for supplying the front lines. In a 2-day window in February of 1945, over 1000 bombers dropped more than 3700 tons of explosives on Dresden. When civilians emerged from their basements and shelters the common theme was that “Dresden was gone.” Later analysis would find that 25,000 civilians died, but the Allies felt no remorse since Germany had started the war.

The people of the United States, though, did not worry about hardships visited upon "innocent Germans." Had Joseph Goebbels put out newsreels featuring Herman Goering complaining about the devastation of civilian neighborhoods in Berlin brought about by Allied bombers, such propaganda would have elicited first enormous scorn and then calls for doubling down on the tonnage of bombs dropped to accelerate a conclusion to the war. Millions of Germans were killed or injured because of the war begun by Hitler, and the same is true of Japanese civilians killed by the Allied bombings of the Japanese home islands: the rulers of Imperial Japan brought that upon themselves.

In March of 1945 the Pacific Air Forces dropped over 1600 incendiary bombs on Tokyo. The Japanese had placed much of their war manufacturing in residential areas and most homes were made of only wood and paper. When the fires were finally out one million Japanese were homeless and nearly 100,000 were dead.

When the United States joined in the international effort to destroy ISIS it culminated with the nine-month battle of Mosul. From October of 2016 through July of 2017, thousands of innocent Iraqis were killed in that battle which included American air and artillery strikes. Again, ISIS had moved into an urban setting and the terror group had to be destroyed. The inevitable byproduct of war in any urban setting is the death and wounding of civilians. As with the aggressors of World War II, ISIS began the war which ended in the destruction of much of Mosul. That is part of the unfortunate nature of war.

Now that the battlefield is the Gaza Strip and specifically the city of Rafah. International pressure is being brought to bear on the Israel Defense Forces ("IDF") to limit or even halt their offensive as a result of "reports" of civilian casualties in Gaza as published by Hamas. Neither Israel nor any third party has anything like an exact figure of civilians killed or wounded in the war in Gaza. What we do know is that Israel has no choice but to prosecute the war in Gaza until Hamas is destroyed and its senior leadership dead or fled. Without the destruction of Hamas, the people of Israel cannot have any sense of security.

Hamas showed its true colors on October 7th, 2023. For 17 years, Israel pursued a policy of co-existence with the terror organization that controlled everything in the Gaza Strip, Numerous Israeli governments counted on the evolution of Hamas into a governing regime, even if authoritarian. On October 7th Hamas made it clear that they are devoted to only one thing, the massacring of Jews. Whatever else Hamas says or does, it is a death cult. Hamas clearly focused more on amassing arms and digging tunnels than the welfare of the citizens of Gaza. If allowed to remain in Gaza in any significant size and with its underground fortress intact, it would only be a matter of time until Hamas unleashed another wave of barbarism. Early on President Biden and his inner circle endorsed Israel doing what it needed to do for its own security.

Now that the election is 8 months away, and the Democratic Party is fracturing Biden and his National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan are warning Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel against a major ground operation in Rafah. For Israel there is really no alternative, and diplomats across the globe know this. If Hamas will not come out from the tunnels under civilian areas, they will have to be flushed out in a series of brutal tunnel battles. Iran equally has no interest in changing the status quo. As the puppet master in a proxy war, they are only expending war supplies arming Hamas while hopefully wearing down their sworn western enemies.

The reliable estimates of Hamas terrorists who are cornered in Rafah and its tunnels is 10,000. Israel must absolutely enter and subdue all of Rafah, must absolutely map and destroy the underground fortress, and must re-take the corridor between Gaza and Egypt. There is no alternative for Israel unless it wants to wait for another massacre in a few more years once Hamas is rearmed. An enormous majorities of Israelis want the war in Gaza executed until Hamas is totally destroyed. We would want the same if a force demonstrating similar brutality crossed our border.

Changing direction, in his 2024 “State of the Union” address, President Biden followed closely by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer verbally attacked Israel. They did so for their own selfish domestic political reasons. The president’s abysmal approval ratings and Schumer’s desire to remain the leader of fractured Senate Democrats required rhetorical blasts at Israel and Netanyahu in order to satisfy the extreme left of their Democratic coalition. These rhetorical attacks were gifts to Hamas terrorists hiding in their tunnels and hoping that somehow the world would hold back Israeli forces. For the IDF, merely camping outside Rafah is not an option.

For Biden and Schumer there is no grand strategy in the criticisms of Israel. The hard left members of the Democratic Party will not be satisfied regardless, and the traditionally reliable American Jewish coalition of the Democratic Party is now wavering in its support for Biden and Schumer.

At the end of the Second World War the Allies did what they needed to do to rehabilitate Germany and Japan (Marshall Plan), and both countries are now solidly within the Western alliance. It is possible that a Gaza without Hamas leadership could reach the potential of any major metropolitan region on the Mediterranean coast. But only if the future leadership of the Strip want economic growth as opposed to planning and stockpiling for a future attempt to destroy Israel.

It is doubtful that the IDF wants to kill civilians in Gaza any more than American forces wanted to kill German and Japanese civilians in WWII. But the war in Gaza cannot end in a truce, it must be won in absolute terms with the destruction of Hamas. Only the end of Hamas will bring sustaining peace and the potential for prosperity to the region. What President Biden and Senator Schumer need to do is stop playing politics and recognize the need for Israeli security.

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