Sending Messages

As I said in an earlier post, I can´t find any forceful argument in favor of U.S. strikes in Syria besides the need to project our super power status, even though there is tacit, if not outright, admission that there is no reason to think strikes would accomplish much of anything. And plenty of reasons to believe our action would make things worse, for example as regards Shiite-Sunni relations in Iraq.

But I found plenty of references to how a strike would send a message to Iran and to Hezbollah. The talking heads and opinionators are fairly explicit about the need to send messages. Now Heitor sent me a really good article by Robert Fisk in the The Independent making that very case,  that this whole thing about attacking Syria is really about Iran.

It would be nice not to have such a cynical view of our government. One would like to think we are considering action from a compelling interest in saving human lives, rather than taking Syrian lives to frighten the new leader in Iran.

It isn't without precedent, you know. How many scores of thousands of Japanese did we kill with our two WMDs just to send a message to Stalin?

The official cover-story rationalization is well known, that a million Americans would have been killed in an invasion of Japan had we not dropped the bombs. For over 65 years arguments that the U.S. had other options available have been dismissively pushed aside. I don't recall the details anymore, but the Smithsonian was forced to cancel a planned exhibit in the mid-19902 about the bombing, because the story they proposed to tell didn't follow the official 50-year old spin.

Still, documents have now been released showing that the Japanese had been trying to surrender for at least three weeks before Hiroshima, and that this was known by all of the Allied leaders. And of course all Allied leaders knew Japan was on the brink of defeat, in any case.