Cruz, others reach new level of disgust
Some tough talk has been spouting from the mouths of the sabre-rattlers running for president.
Sen. Ted Cruz has said he wants to “carpet bomb” the Islamic militants. He’s even said he’d like to find out whether “sand can glow in the dark,” a not-so-subtle reference to the use of nuclear weaponry.
When asked at the most recent Republican debate if he meant the indiscriminate destruction of cities, he said no, that he meant carpet bombing only the places where the ISIS fighters are.
Of course, it would be convenient for the United States and its Western allies if the militants were to cooperate and congregate in the wide-open desert where they could be systematically eradicated, but they are not that stupid. They have taken over towns and cities and are using the civilian population as their human shield.
Carpet bombing, or area bombardment, which Cruz and others have proposed is, in fact, a war crime. The U.S. “Christmas bombing” of 1972 against Hanoi and Haiphong is believed to have violated the civilian protections of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. An explicit ban on area bombardment was first codified in the 1977 Additional Protocol I, which applies to bombardments of cities, towns, villages, or other areas containing a concentration of civilians.
History provides the best definition of carpet bombing. Toward the end of World War II, between Feb. 13 and Feb. 15, 1945, 722 British bombers and 527 planes of the U.S. Army Air Forces dropped 3,900 tons of bombs on the German city of Dresden, despite the fact it had little military significance as a target. The bombing and the fire storm it created killed between 23,000 and 25,000 people, almost all of them civilians.
A few weeks later, on March 9, 1945, U.S. bombers struck Tokyo, killing an estimated 100,000 and wounding one million. That death toll was higher than the totals of those immediately killed at Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
When we hear Islamic extremists chant “Death to all nonbelievers!” we react with disgust. We ought to have the same reaction when we hear these tough-talking politicos proposing, essentially, the same thing.