This word “madman” is thrown about all too often. What evidence is there that Saddam was deranged?
Now Mao Zedong, there was a real madman. He mused that the death of tens of millions of Chinese in a nuclear exchange would be something he could live with. And yet the United States managed to contain him.
I find richly amusing the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” and the reflexive horror it inspires, especially coming from the only country that has ever dared use nuclear weapons on civilians—twice, as it happened. And what are cruise missiles and daisy cutters, if not weapons of mass destruction?
Please don’t ascribe these comments to “anti-Americanism.” They are simply a response to the latter-day Manichaeism of the American government, which posits that its enemies are by definition mad and that these countries do not possess the right of self-defense.

Was I saying that Hussein was literally deranged? No. But what we’ve learned about the internal irrationality and horror of the system that he ran justifies the description of madman. He controlled that country through extremes of terror and torture that fit Plato’s description of the tyrant who has released the demonic forces within himself. He launched his country into horribly destructive wars, war for the sake of war. He refused to pull back from Kuwait or to reveal his weapons progreams when such yielding would have spared him destruction. He even apparently created the illusion that he had more WMDs than he really had, even though he knew his possession of those WMDs would lead to a US invasion of his country and his probable death. These are not the acts of a person I would call rational.

Mr. Grace continues: “I find richly amusing the phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and the reflexive horror it inspires, especially coming from the only country that has ever dared use nuclear weapons on civilians—twice, as it happened.”

So what does Mr. Grace think we should have done? I guess he thinks we should have said to ourselves: “Gosh, we used the A-Bomb on Japan in WWII, therefore we have no right to be concerned about the prospect of some terrorist group setting of a biological or chemical weapon in one of our cities.” Mr. Grace has no argument to offer, just sneering moral equivalency.

In any case, a person who expresses contempt for Americans’ rational fear of mass harm and destruction in the wake of September 11 is not someone I care to have a further discussion with.

Japanese military documents that were declassified in the 1970s (cited by John Costello in “The War in the Pacific”) reveal that the Japanese Army, with no hope of victory, was training women and teenage boys to use sharpened farm implements in Banzai charges against American soldiers, should we have invaded Japan. They were to do this at night to better their odds. The civilian slaughter would have dwarfed Hiroshima and Nagasaki by an order of magnitude.

It is an interesting what-if of history to muse about how the war might have ended if we had not insisted on an unconditional surrender, which we first started talking about in the angry days just after Pearl Harbor. Being human, I cannot condemn those who made those terms public at the beginning of the war; American public opinion demanded it. Once you have that demand, the final play of events in August, 1945, was almost inevitable, and certainly cost far fewer lives than the alternatives. And not just American lives, but fewer Japanese lives, as well.

An education about these matters is a good prerequisite for spouting opinions about them.

After doing some reading on this years ago I came to the conclusion that, as inconceivably horrible as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, the bomb was a blessing, a miracle, since the alternatives—for the Japanese even more than for the Americans—would have been infinitely worse.

Not only did it bring the war to a sudden end, but the way in which it did it, considering the Japanese’ aggressive ideology and their hierachical psychology in which other people are seen either as superiors or inferiors, assured peace. In a single instant the Japanese went from seeing the Americans as subhumans, against whom anything was permitted, to seeing them as their respected superiors. This was made possible by the sheer overwhelming destructiveness of the bomb. There was thus a perfect fit between the nature of the enemy, and the nature of the weapon we used to defeat him.

In light of President Clinton’s speeches, the current posturing of the democrat presidential candidates is shown to be nothing more than an effort to appeal to the anti-Americanism in the democrat core constituencies who vote in the primaries. Given it potential misreading by our enemies abroad, it is irreponsible in the extreme. At a deeper level however, the assertion that our actions in the Middle East were unnecessary is part of the liberals’ denial of the reality of human evil. They seem unable to comprehend that surreptitious dabbling in terror had become for the various thug states a means of inflating their power at home and abroad (look at the success, wealth, and power accrued by a man who would otherwise simply be an obscure criminal, Yassir Arafat), and this dabbling, thanks to the complexity of the modern world and the resources of technology had become hugely threatening. To this of course, they have no response whatever.