Gary Bass Quotes

He was the Secretary of State in the War Office at the time. The Royal Air Force had suggested an experiment---gassing “recalcitrant Arabs” from the air. This predated Sadaam Hussein's gassing of Hussein's gassing of his own people by over 70 years.

The First World War had recently ended with the mass of horrible casualties that resulted from the use of poison gas. Permanently debilitated veterans were trying to rebuild a life all over England. Many Englishmen wanted to ban English use of poison gas. Churchill objected as the Middle East was a cauldron of various forms of terrorism then in areas that the British were “responsible for” under the Peace Treaty. He argued that there was little difference be gas and shells, but that did not persuade many others. Churchill was outvoted and overruled and the British have never used poison gas since although they had a large supply and were prepared to use it in WWII if the Germans did. This quotation was a blot on Churchill’s reputation. One issue was whether or not it was human to use poison gas. Churchill was willing to say no where white Christians were concerned but was perfectly willing to use them on the “uncivilized”.

A little over a decade later, it was the conservative President who was condemning Saddam Hussein for gassing his own people and justified the Iraq War in part over that. And in 2007 Saddam having been toppled from power, he was tried for this crimes against humanity with the major charge being his gassing of the Iraqi Kurds. He was hanged for the “liberal hate speech” which had turned into conservative hate speech, but was a correct accusation regardless of which political pole was making it. There were few issues where most Americans were as unanimous as Saddam’s guilt in the gassing of the Kurds with Limbaugh and Saddam’s relatives being about the only people who saw it as propaganda.

Ironically Germany which has publicly usually been so sensitive and responsible after their massive chemical extermination in the concentration camps of WWII, was embarrassed by their own private companies which, to make money, sold the chemicals and the technology to the then worst murderer in the world.

The second atomic bomb had just been dropped.

Although generally a right wing conservative, Clark today sounds like almost like an extreme leftist on the issue. At the time however, many thought that he had taken leave of his senses. He not only was completely contrary to bipartisan national policy but opposed by almost universal American public opinion. He is one of the very few significant American officials to oppose the war policies.

Bombing had reached the point where conventional bombing raids on industrial cities like Tokyo and Hamburg produced even more civilian casualties than did the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. Tibbets’ view, through the lens of hindsight, was developed by many of the Allied servicemen who had been forced into war by expansionist and militaristic nations like Japan and Germany both of which placed much of their war material manufacturing capability in the midst of their otherwise civilian cities. Both brutally violated the laws of war and committed atrocities many times over before the allies began retaliating. There are still some who believe that it was wrong to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. Some even feel that the mass bombing of Japanese and German cities in retaliation and in furtherance of the war effort was morally wrong. But at the time, the millions of casualties anticipated in the invasion of the Japanese mainland, persuaded virtually every American soldier and civilian that there was nothing wrong with use of the Atomic bomb, and many saw it as an absolute Godsend to prevent all the American and Japanese causalities that would have come otherwise. Many scholars remark on how it was virtually impossible to find any significant number of misgivings before or just after Hiroshima. Tibbet’s view was typical.

This quotation is a good example of how tolerant some nations can be in terms of maintaining diplomatic relations and trade relations with other countries. The American and English governments chose to simply protest and condemn the slanderous statement but decided that the Prime Minister was pandering to his political local Islamic base, so took no further action and kept open diplomatic relations. Mahathir had a history of being very accusatory of the West with respect to anything that affected the Arab Muslims. The number of Muslims killed by the Americans and British in the Iraq War was very small compared to the huge number of Muslims killed by other Muslims in their Sunni Shiite civil war. While Bush and Blair both generated support for the Iraq invasion by making claims of WMD development in Iraq that were false, it is not clear whether or not they knew their statements were false, should have known that they were false, created an atmosphere against Iraq that was likely to produce false accusations, or were simple misled by poor intelligence. Mahathir, of course, chose to assume the worst case, and claim it was true, which is what many people think Bush and Blair did in analyzing the intelligence on Iraq.

3rd Earl Russell of Kingston

Almost every use of war weapons of mass destruction in history have been justified with the rationale that the total casualties would be reduced. It sometimes has been such as with the use of the atomic bomb in WWII but usually it has not. The same argument was made incidentally by Dr. Gattling, the inventor of the machine gun. In WWI far more men were killed by machine gun fire than poison gas.