sid75

Associative thinking

At times, when I am online surfing through heaps of latest news, analytical reviews, and yellow-press gossips, along with ads and G-d knows what else, I have some some interesting associations come into my mind. Today I ran across two headlines, "Dresden" and "Lebanon bombings," placed next to each other, and the pieces came together in a snap.

For start, this is worth a small excursus into the history of World War II. A.J.P. Taylor wrote, "Aimless bombing, done without targeting any particular objects, for four years was considered to be an achievement of the British, hailed by the government the public alike." (A.J.P. Taylor. The Second World War. Hamish Hamilton. L., 1975.)

But was it really always as aimless and untargeted as they claimed, or was there indeed a certain reason and order that guided that mess? Let's look at the notorious bombing of a major German cultural center, a museum-city of Dresden. Just before the end of the war, on February 14, 1945 it suffered a cruel, devastating, and deadly bombing. Enough emotional and horrifying material has been written about it, so I don't have to reiterate. I will just quote a few abstracts from the official documents of the Royal Air Force Archive, and also from the "Historical Analysis of Dresden Bombings of 14-15 February 1945," prepared by the US Air Force Archive.

1. The first wave of bombers included, according to the official data, 796 Lancaster planes, and 9 Mosquito planes. They dropped almost 1,500 demolition bombs and 1,200 tons of fire bombs on the capital of Saxonia.
2. This wave arrived at 10:07 PM on 2/13, then again after 3 hours, and then last time at 10 AM on 2/14, when British bombers were also joined by Americans.
3. The exact death toll of the Dresden Bombing will probably never be known. The official documents of the Royal Air Force Archive state that over 50,000 people were killed. Unofficially, numbers as high as 120,000-150,000 and even 500,000 have been suggested.
4. The bombing was coordinated with the Soviets and pursued two main goals: making it difficult for the German forces to move east, and to spread panic among the civilian population. The Allied command had decided that bombing of Dresden was necessary "in order to achieve strategic goals equally important to both the Allies and the Russians."

In the aftermath, the main critique of this action, comparable in terms damage to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, was its unreasonableness, as Dresden, a museum-city, was not a military target itself. However, an investigation that was conducted by the Royal Air Force Archive concluded that the city had at least 110 industrial sites that in fact were "legitimate military targets." Among them were facilities that produced poison gases, flak cannon and field artillery supplies, and optical devices.
The same term is used in the "Analysis" done by the US Air Force Archive: "the bombing of Dresden was fully justified because it was a legitimate military target."

It should be added that both investigations were not conducted immediately. They were done much later, "on cooler heads," so to say. In fact, immediately after the bombing, no government had raised a protest. Not even the chief prude, the Vatican, had said a word.

So with regards to all this, I have a couple of questions.
1. Are the villages of southern Lebanon, including Qana, which are packed with rocket launchers and ammunition, and also host Hizballah fighters, a "legitimate military target" for Israel?
2. Are Qiryat Shmona, Nahariya, and tens of other towns of northern Israel, which have no military production facilities, ammunition warehouses or Tsahal forces in them, "legitimate military targets" for Hizballah?
And if you think the same as what I think, who do you believe should be condemned for their actions? And isn't it time yet to start counting our losses and bring a counter-claim against Lebanon? Or shall we just keep apologizing?

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