The old way worked better.
I am a big fan of the late General Curtis LeMay. I have mentioned him and his colorful ways in many of my articles. The four-star general always seemed to be in the right place at the right time: He was a commander in the Eighth Air Force in England, Commanding General of the XXI Bomber Command fighting Japan, head of US Air Forces in Europe during the Berlin Air Lift, first leader of Strategic Air Command, and Chief of Staff of the Air Force until 1965. If there was any deceased fighting man I could have come back for a quick 15 minute conversation, it would be General May. I would like to ask him about today’s smart munitions versus the saturation bombing of his day.
One day, General LeMay confided in his adjutant that should Japan win the war, he would be a war criminal. He had used incendiaries to destroy 60 Japanese cities, including large chunks of Tokyo. More people died from his fire bombing of the Japanese capital than did during either of the nuclear detonations. His pilots described flying over the burning city, in which massive winds would push up their B-29s thousands of feet, as if they were toys. In a vein similar to LeMay’s comments, Admiral Karl Doenitz asked Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz if the US had employed unrestricted warfare against Japanese shipping. The American’s positive reply kept the head of the German Navy (and briefly final Fuhrer) from the gallows. He received a prison sentence and lived out his life in West Germany until he died in 1980.
When the Nuremberg Trials took place after World War II, they were in a way revolutionary. In the past, war criminals were tried and prosecuted in the countries in which their offenses had occurred. With the trial of some of the top Nazi officials, an “international law” was created. Several of the men on trial noted that there was no such thing as international law and no basis for the prosecutions against them. On the one hand, the new arrangement seemed smart: the scale of death and destruction in World War II required a mechanism to hold the remaining architects of the war and mass murder of Jews and others responsible. What would one do? Take the hefty Field Marshal Goering and parade him through England, France, Russia, Poland and elsewhere, making a trial in each country and then flipping a coin to decide who gets to actually fulfill the death sentence? Nuremberg saved the headache by bringing prosecutors and judges from the major winning Allied countries and do all of the legal stuff in one place. The key word in the preceding sentence is “winning”.
Oskar Schindler—yes, that Schindler—was tasked by the Abwehr to arrange the staged Polish attack that was used to justify the German march into Poland in September of 1939. Polish soldiers were killed and dragged over to the German side of the border, where the Fuhrer could claim that they came for sabotage. When Hitler was told that history would show that the ruse was a false-flag operation, Hitler stated that the winners write the history.
If we still lived in the rules pre-Nuremberg, then nobody would be talking about the US or Israel committing supposed “war crimes” by attacking a country that has sworn for five decades to destroy both countries. A victorious US-Israel alliance would dictate the peace and list the surviving mullahs and generals as war criminals for their firing rockets at civilian populations and the murder of tens of thousands of Iranian citizens. But we now have a wholly independent set of “international courts” that don’t care who did what but simply act against the countries and people they don’t like. The farcical International Court of Justice (ICJ) can accuse Israel of war crimes in avenging its murdered citizens but it will not drag Hamas members to the Hague to stand trial for mass rape and murder. The international judiciaries that grew out of Nuremberg are not an arm of the winning side but rather a supposedly independent judiciary that seeks to redress wrongs in the world. The problem is that such kangaroo courts don’t take into account who the good guys and bad guys are. They don’t take into account who is the source of the problems. Rather, they look at some event—a bomb that fell on a hospital—and then claim that a war crime or crime against humanity was committed. They don’t think about who started the war or that no war is perfect and that every war has had significant collateral damage. No, they just look to the low-hanging fruit, namely the countries stupid enough to actually take the charges seriously. Russia, Iran and China wouldn’t send their accused people to the Hague. Europeans and the US under Democrats might be dumb enough to do so.
General LeMay was not speaking idly. If the Japanese had won, General MacArthur would have been brought to the deck of the Yamato parked in Pearl Harbor. LeMay and his commanders would have been tried as war criminals and most likely found guilty. The ICJ does not care who the good guys or bad guys are; they simply look at warfare and start to apportion blame. This is an extremely dangerous approach, and it is intentionally so. The lefty morons always talk about outlawing war, and they can use courts to prosecute democratic governments that are attacked by dictators or rogue regimes. Israel has been dragged to the Hague as she fights to protect herself from Iran and its satellite terror groups. In a normal world, Israel wins and the top terrorists and Iranians are held accountable for their actions. In the lefty fantasy of total world government, Israel is guilty for any miscue like hitting a hospital (even if it’s filled with terrorists and weapons) or a family structure. We woke up at three thirty this morning to a phone warning for incoming Iranian projectiles. As we waited for sirens that never came, we saw four Iranian missiles streaking with their orange glow towards Tel Aviv and the center of the country. They are aimed at civilians and many of them have cluster warheads. The clowns at the Hague don’t care how Iran violates the rules of war; their target is always Israel and other Western countries.
What the ban-war crowd doesn’t understand is that there is a time for righteous battle, as the US is now engaged with the lunatic mullahs. Just as we have doctors and drugs for when a person does not feel well and repair shops and parts when our cars are ill, war is one tool when the world is out of sorts. The modern lefties would rather have capitulated to Hitler and Tojo than put up a valiant multiyear fight to defeat them and their fascist ideologies.
The war will end and I hope that Iran will be on its way back to the 7th Century. The clowns in the Democratic Party and in Europe will demand that Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu be treated and tried as war criminals. And this ridiculous state of affairs, where the two men are using their military and other resources to rid the world of a murderous regime, is an outcome of the Nuremberg Trials. It seemed like such a good idea, and maybe it was when the winners were the judges and executioners. But we now have third-world judges and they want to stick it to the West more than make the world safer. Maybe during my 15 minute audience with General LeMay, we can get one final bombing run over the international court in the Hague and finish this misguided adventure.
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