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I take issue with some of your observations.

It's true that Germany sent Uranium to Japan as their defenses collapsed. That was 25 March, 1945. German forces surrendered about six weeks later, around 5 May. The Captain, Feher I believe, surrendered to Allied Powers following orders for all U-boats to surrender (insert interesting tangent here) Assuming he would have violated orders and made it to Japan, it would have only meant Japanese would have had Uranium in mid 1945. The first working nuclear bomb was detonated at the Trinity site in July 1945, just a few weeks later. The United States bombed japan in August, just a few weeks after that. There has been no significant evidence that the Japanese were anywhere near capable of using the Uranium to construct a working bomb in those 8-10 weeks. And even if they had, industrial production in the states would have landed a dozen nuclear bombs on Japanese soil for every one they could have built.

It's also true that the Japanese feared the Russians more than the United States, but Japan was a complex cauldron of interests at that time. For instance, the surrender recording by the Emperor had to be smuggled out of the Palace because military elements would have destroyed it if they had found it. So simply saying that they would not have surrendered solely due to the atomic bombings is misleading at best. Oddly enough, you're over-simplying it. There were many interests in Japan, and the interests of surrendering to the United States won out. At the end of the day, it was the emperor's call, and the diplomatic service won out over the military.

History is complicated, yes. The British performed against the Germans in a way that lent credence to Churchill's statement that this was "our finest hour". But there was also lease-lend, and lots of loans, and secret help from the United States. FDR realized the war was coming but had to wait until American popular opinion realized it as well. There was also Hitler's mucking around with the execution of the air war, diverting bombing raids from airfields (where they were devastating) to civilian targets, where they inflicted terror but were militarily not as significant.

I know WWII was the most complex story ever in terms of ethics. Members of my own family died in the nazi death camps, so how could I be against fighting that war? However, no amount of complexity and evil could make me drop an A-bomb on a city.

At some point I have to say, whatever the consequences, I'm just not going to do this. You don't torture. You don't kill indiscriminately. Otherwise there is nothing left worth fighting for anyway.

War is all about making the other person stop fighting. War has been around as long as there have been people with different opinions and the will to use force to settle them.

These are super-ethical issues: ie, they exist regardless of your opinion of them. I hope there is no disagreement on them.

Throughout history all of the techniques you mention have been used to advance society in order to put you in a position of modern life being able to make your opinion to quit fighting under certain circumstances. Since you are alive right now, and must find some value to your life, it follows that after all of these conflicts in which your rules were not followed, there was still something left that was worth fighting for. At least at the level of civilization. So it follows that you at least value the results of other people with fewer qualms than you. Otherwise you should be living in a cave by firelight -- but fire was probably stolen by force involving torture, mass killings, etc. as well, so put the torch out.

That's at a civilization level. At a personal level, many folks throughout history have had moral issues with various parts of war. In the United States, many many times the rest of the populace fought wars the Quakers refused to participate in. In this case, either 1) you die, 2) you submit, or 3) somebody else with fewer moral qualms fights the war for you.

Morals are a key part of your personal life. I just wouldn't substitute my personal morals for my greater responsibility to mankind. My personal morals might be wrong, and if morals mean anything they mean the ability to introspect and change. I'm fully prepared to be wrong and face the personal consequences to me if my morals tell me to do or not to do something. It becomes selfish and grossly immoral, in my opinion, to inflict consequences on others under the banner of my own self-righteousness. War is a nasty, ugly business and it should be avoided at all costs mainly because of this equation: it strips us all to the primal need to dominate or die.

That's just my opinion. I would not mean to judge. I've found self-righteousness on both sides of the "just war" discussion, and it seems to hide the greater issue of how mankind as a race reacts and suffers.

You're implying that we would not be able to enjoy all the benefits of modern life (or even our own existence) if it wasn't for the atrocities of the past. I don't agree with that. The things I find valuable in the present might still be here, and more on top of it, if history had taken a differnt course.

But I never denied that some wars are justified. I'm just saying that winning them is not worth throwing out of the window all the things that we want to achieve by winning them.

Your logic is that by accepting defeat (in some extreme cases) instead of using torture and mass murder I also accept that these very things do in fact take hold. That's not a necessary conclusion though. Even lost wars have sometimes had the exact opposite effect of what the winner had expected. And vice versa you could win a war but lose the argument so thoroughly that the principles of your enemy prevail for generations.

Put differently, it is important how wars are won, not just that they are won, because wars are not the end of the world and we have to live with the consequences of how things were done in past wars.

You realize, of course, that to sit in modern Germany alive and well (and being able to speak freely) is the result of two world wars, a cold war, a dozen or so continental wars (including ones that gave you religious freedom) countless invasions and counterinvasions by various tribes, the Romans seeking to pacify the Germanic tribes -- the limit of this list is simply the limits of our written record. Most all of these conflicts were fought "wrongly" according to your standards, because they involved torture and mass killings.

Your supposition is that somehow modern life would have come about without all of this dirty armed conflict. Since it did, in fact, happen the other way, the onus is on you to explain how all of this magic would work. I'm simply reporting to you that by your own standards you should still be living in a tribe in the woods somewhere.

Wars in many cases have different outcomes than the victors imagine. That's a non-sequiter, however, in that as 3-dimensional beings we are forced to make our best judgments and go forward. I'm not making an "ends justify the means" argument. I'm stating that the means must take into consideration what the ultimate ends will be for the human race, not just dither around about aspects of violence. Sometimes we get it wrong, sure, but that doesn't relieve us of our responsibility to think for more than just ourselves.

My personal morals say that I should never torture or kill. But I have a greater obligation to mankind than to myself. If forced, I have an obligation to my species that overrules the obligation I have to my conscience. It is better to die than violate one's personal morals, but it is better to violate one's personal morals than to let mankind perish. I am not the center of the moral universe.

That's some hard logic. Thanks for your response.

"I'm simply reporting to you that by your own standards you should still be living in a tribe in the woods somewhere"

I'm afraid that's not "simply" reporting. That's a pretty far reaching and (in my view) far fetched assumption. Most atrocities were not committed in the name of anything that got us out of the woods. Quite the contrary. And those atrocities that were committed with that aim may not have been necessary to get us out of the woods after all. At least that's not the kind of certainty you make it out to be.

"My personal morals say that I should never torture or kill. But I have a greater obligation to mankind than to myself. If forced, I have an obligation to my species that overrules the obligation I have to my conscience"

I'm not rejecting this idea outright, but I will say that most of the time the uncertainties of a complex world are so vast that I could never be so convinced of the righteousness of my cause that I would torture or kill indiscriminately. What if I'm wrong? What if my torturing and killing causes more torturing and killing instead of less? Your argument is very popular among all kinds of extremists by the way (which doesn't mean I'm assuming you are one of them of course)

It's reporting. We can go down the list of whatever moral values you have: freedom of religion, speech, the ability to assemble with other people who feel like you, your ability to have your own property, your ability to be responsible for your soul -- all of these come from armed conflict between one side who was against it and one side who was for it. And all armed conflict involved atrocities.

That's just history.

the uncertainties of a complex world are so vast that I could never be so convinced of the righteousness of my cause

This we agree upon. What I'm saying is that you are forced to make a decision. If you default to self-destruction by virtue of an inability to decide, or if you decide self-destruction is preferable to victory, then in fact you are still making a decision -- that decision is to let the other side have their way. You're on the hook either way. And in fact, I would argue that if the other side is committing atrocities as well, you're even more on the hook for inaction to prevent their atrocities from occurring.

In practice this isn't extremely complex, it's just unpleasant as heck. Let's use the European theater in the last war. Hitler was trying to exterminate the Jews and others. In addition, both sides committed atrocities (although history will show the allies committed much less than the Germans) In addition, both sides tortured.

Now you can argue to to participate on either side would be immoral. You can argue this from a variety of viewpoints. But at the end of the day one side was fighting in order for longer-term peace to happen where nations and people would be free. The other side was fighting to dominate large portions of Europe and the purify the Aryan race. Any reasonable observer would conclude that the greater good for mankind was more free people, not more dead subjected people.

Extremists may use these arguments. I don't know. If so, they would be obliged to point out how their viewpoint would lead to more free alive people and less dead subjected ones. Since extremism most of the times seeks to subject people and to destroy those who do not agree with them, I believe that rules out 99% of those groups.

You mention extremism. I must point out the other end of the spectrum: it has become fashionable to promote "peace at any cost" and high values in the abstract as long as doing so means I don't have to make moral decisions or participate. In other words, you can ride the high horse of self righteousness to keep out of the muck of actually participating in the world. But then, when a 9-11 rolls around, suddenly you're a rifle-carrying militia member again. Done in this way, and not out of deep moral conviction, it's a form of laziness and self-absorption. In other words, you can use good words and good morals to do very immoral things (like sitting on your ass and not stopping horrors where they occur for the real reason that it might involve some pain or self-sacrifice) And I am definitely not accusing you of this, simply pointing out that both extremes here have problems.

I'm not advocating peace at any cost. I do agree with you that sometimes it's necessary to fight wars, and I would personally take part in it if I thought that it was the right thing to do in a particular situation.

However, you are creating a false dichotomy between committing atrocities and losing the war. You say that historically all wars have come with atrocities and that's true. But there's a difference between observing this fact and claiming that these atrocities were necessary to win the war. The issue I take with your argument is that you make no difference between causality and correlation. And this difference is very important as it determines the extent of atrocities committed as well as the psychological results on both sides.

I do not think that Abu Ghraib was necessary for the US Army to prevail in Iraq. I do not think that Guantanamo was necessary to win the "war against the terror" (which hasn't been won anyway). Both events were extremely damaging to the cause. Guantanamo was much more damaging though, because Abu Ghraib was a violation of the Army's own rules and the people responsible for it have been brought to justice.

Guantanamo, on the other hand, was deemed necessary to win the war and it's one reason why the war has not been won and will possibly never be won, because people all over the world are asking the US, what are you fighting for? Freedom? Rule of law? And then they laugh without waiting for an answer and these are not (just) the evil people.

Things like free speech, democracy, etc, were not achieved by fighting any one war more ruthlessly than the enemy. They were the result of long social struggles, which to a large degree depended on ethical integrity for their success. You cannot create limitless contradictions between what you want to achieve and what you do to achieve it. It hurts your case and it poisons the culture of your own side so much that you're bound to lose the peace even if you win the war.

you are creating a false dichotomy between committing atrocities and losing the war

No. I defined war as something which continues until one side quits. I furthermore identified that you believe that in certain cases it is more desirable to quit than to prosecute a war in certain formats (such as the use of nuclear weapons) I observed that every war has had atrocities on both sides. Finally I observed that we all live in a world where we enjoy various freedoms, cultures, and science because of a lot of previous wars -- wars in which your norms (or any other norms for that matter) were disregarded to some degree.

It follows that there are always moral reasons for not fighting and that we would be living in caves had we all felt the way you describe. Therefore, if you believe that civilization is more important than your own petty opinions you're compelled to make muddy, ugly moral choices when it comes to the use of force. I made no statement that atrocities are necessary to win a war. I will say that war is about making the other side quit. Most often you end up doing something they really, really don't like in order to reach this point. Fire bombing Dresden, dropping the A-bomb on Japan, etc. -- all drew WWII to an end quicker and promoted the greater good. You may participate in a war and commit no atrocities at all. But by participating, you can be sure you are supporting actions and behaviors that on a clear, sane afternoon you would never do. That's why war sucks so much -- it drags us all down to the lowest denominator: survival.

I'm not getting into current events. They are emotionally laden and simply confuse the issues. I will point out that non-state actors acting in non-standard formats have been with us for a long time. They're usually shot on the battlefield or very close to it by means of summary courts martial. I'll also point out that the word "war" is overused to the point to be meaningless. We have a war on terror, a war on poverty (which I believe might involve shooting poor people?), a war on drugs, a war on pollution, etc. Let's take war as something where one side can clearly quit, which ties back to our previous definition. Under that definition, the current war on terror is not really a war at all, since "terror" cannot surrender to anybody.

IMO I'd say war and atrocities do go hand in hand, they don't have to but it just seems to be a downfall of human nature. I believe what happened in Japan is a prime example, the US troops had heard of all the atrocities against POW's and when invading they treated the Japanese dead more like game than humans, including taking trophies, this then got back to the Japanese and they were so disgusted by the American atrocities that when the US invaded cities there were mass suicides because the Japanese didn't want to live through US occupation. So ironically the Japanese Military committing atrocities ended up killing their own people more effectively than if they'd shot a civilian with every POW.

Again looking at history, I believe without war we wouldn't have technology. Most of the technology that we take as granted in the medieval period came from the Mongols, who because of war managed to gather together inventors from multiple countries and cultures and put them together. They took Chinese fireworks and Bronze Workers from Eastern Europe (I can't remember the country) and put 1 + 1 together, they built a cannon. They also committed many atrocities, however it was always the victims own fault, many times they killed the messenger, which the Mongol's invented their own postal service so they got pissed off at that and just besieged cities. Other times they were given fare warning, nearly always 'surrender and we'll let you live your lives as you always have', yet people refused. IIRC one time the citizens refused and killed the messenger, this one led to the Mongols diverting a river into the city and then slaughtering everyone.

The book I read (http://www.amazon.com/Genghis-Khan-Making-Modern-World/dp/06...) is a real eye opener. The man merely wanted to protect his own family, but betrayal after betrayal he ended up conquering most of the old world. The only reason he didn't take over all of western europe was because 'middle' europe was so poor they thought it was like what we imagine the third world. Aside from Europe they didn't invade most of Africa and India, this was purely because they couldn't ride their horses and didn't feel like invading.

Well, Daniel and electromagnetic, since I feel I'm beginning to repeat my arguments, I will say something general and then leave it there.

What seems odd to me is the role that history plays in your arguments. You are using it not just as something we can observe and use to inform our judgement about the likelyhood of things. You promote history to a normative force, something fateful that tells us how things must always be, something we must obey, something with a causal logic. Kind of similar to Karl Marx' ideas how capitalism would logically have to fail.

History is seen almost like a living conscious being with it's own objectives that makes you commit atrocities because for all time everybody will commit them and you must hit hardest to prevail.

I think this view disregards that complex systems can change in unpredictable ways and that mankind has reached a level of global interconnection of economies, information and, to some degree, values, that may change the whole game. At the same time, the power of individuals to create things of global impact is infinitely greater than ever before. This works in technology, in influencing opinions as well as in terrorism unfortunately.

It may just be that the rules of the past are obsolete, that no two great powers will ever wage war against each other again. Not just because of some ethic argument, but because it is no longer in anyone's interest. War, in the past, has always been seen as a means to gain economic strength. I think this kind of imperialist logic is starting to break down. All the geostrategic thinking is becoming ineffective.

And for myself I can say this. I refuse to follow the logic of you either fight the evil people or you have already made a decsion to help them. That's not logical in all cases (sometimes it is though). If I go and torture someone, I know what the immediate consequences are. If I don't do it, I cannot be sure what the consequences are, so this is not the kind of binary decision between two knowns that it's made out to be.

Sometimes I feel that it would help to solve many conflicts in this world if people just individually decided to step back for a while and do something useful instead of fighting. The northern ireland conflict ended partly because the Republic of Ireland had become economically incredibly successful. Some people had been doing something useful for a while, like writing software and building stuff, and that changed the game.

Thanks for the debate

Members of my own family died in the nazi death camps

Which camps? Were they in Germany or Poland?

I'm a little confused by what you meant at the end. Are you saying the British Navy prevented the Germans from invading America?