Dear Mr Melkonian,
Your response to my speech seems to be that the firebombing of Dresden, the deployment of nuclear weapons on the Japanese mainland, and heavy tactical bombing of Japan in the last months of the war were brutal, or even criminal acts that dwarf the minor faux pas we associate with Abu Ghraib. I consider this comparison to be radically false. The tactics used by the Allies during the Second World War were harsh, but also within the bounds set for warfare at the time they were used (which is the only appropriate standard by which they are to be judged). What happens on the battlefield is one thing. And how we treat a person disarmed and completely within our power is something very different again. This is an area in which the United States has had a very long and extremely honorable tradition - indeed a tradition which has helped define and enoble us among the community of nations. True, Germans had bitter memories of the bombings. But these were offset very effectively by the stories told by German soldiers who returned home from American internment and who described the kind-hearted treatment they received. I am not speculating about this. I grew up in Germany and heard these stories for years; they had a strong effect on me. And they made a decisive difference. You seem to feel that the American tradition of humane treatment of prisoners is something meaningless. For me it is a sacred legacy. That's the difference between us.

I think Mr. Horton intends to compare the wartime treatment of prisoners of war, not the overall prosecution of battlefield campaigns. It has certainly been accepted wisdom (for whatever that is worth) that Germans were very aware of America's good treatment of POWs, and that it was the strongest weapon the U.S.A. had for encouraging surrender.

The current administration has tried to distinguish its prisoners by re-defining the conflict. Though I disagree with this argument, I see that one can plausibly distinguish between German POWs and those captured in Afghanistan on the basis of their political organization. For me (and, apparently, Horton), this is a distinction without a difference.

Raffi, your statement is well put, but I don't think it meets the substance of Mr. Horton's argument. If you don't believe that the good-treatment of "enemy combatants" would have a positive result in Afghanistan, I'm confident you can make a strong case for that position.

Yep, the US slaughtered hundreds of thousands of civilians in WWII.

So what? War is hell.

So Mr. Horton is excluding battlefield tactics from consideration? Perhaps that is defensible, although it seems an awfully convenient way to sweep Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden under the carpet.

So: What does Mr. Horton have in mind? The kind-hearted, gentle, and humane way that Roosevelt and Earl Warren rounded up tens of thousands of Japanese-American civilians and put them in concentration camps?

Also, not that this needs saying, but it seems risible to assert that the Japanese viewed us more favorably -- because even though we nuked innocent people and put others in concentration camps, at least we didn't torture any of them (which in itself is probably very dubious -- how much you wanna bet that no Japanese prisoners ever got roughed up?).

By the same logic, the Iraqis would all love us and be ready to establish democracy if only we had 1) nuked Baghdad and Fallujah, and 2) put all Muslim Americans in concentration camps.

Horton attempts to salvage his position by limiting the discussion to treatment of POWs, but even here he is utterly deceptive. Didn't we intern all German soldiers for two years after the war ended? Didn't our "great Russian ally" (that is how college professors at the time typically referred to the Soviet Union) essentially hold POWs as slave laborers forever and ever until they died? Did anyone on the Yale faculty complain? Of course not.

Well put, Raffi.

It's not immeidately clear to me why we should accept Mr. Horton's apparent moral distinction between battlefield atrocities (which are to be accepted so long as they are "within the bounds set for warfare at the time they were used") and wartrime atrocities which happen to occur off of the main battlefield. Note how Mr. Horton gives no account of how the "bounds set for warfare" are determined and offers no reason for believing that those bounds should cleanse us from moral responsibility for our actions (or should permit us to apply a different standard to actions which occur on the battlefield and actions which occur just off of the battlefield). Indeed, on any day other than today, I imagine that Mr. Horton would rail against the inhumanity of Dresden.

Horton makes a decent point, but that rhetorical flourish at the end is a bit cheap. Why not just say that "the difference between you and me is that I don't hate America"?

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