Editor,
On Aug. 6, 1945, American airmen detonated a nuclear bomb over Hiroshima, Japan, and three days later dropped a second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki. The bombs are estimated to have killed almost 300,000 people, most of them civilians. Had we invaded Japan, a country with an army far larger than Iraq, the cost of life would have been far greater for the U.S.
America was not the aggressor in World War II, but the victim of a brutal attack. Any deaths that occurred in America's self-defense, therefore, are to be blamed on the aggressors who made them necessary. It is the solemn responsibility of the U.S. government to protect American citizens, ruthlessly
destroying those who threaten us. If civilians die in the process, as they did in Japan, it merely underscores the enormity of the stakes when a populace embraces or submits to a murderous, dictatorial regime.
On another note, the U.S. should not be building democracies in the Middle East, but rather instilling fear. More than three-fourths of Americans did not see any threat from Hitler just months before D-Day. This could have saved thousands of lives had the U.S. had the moral certitude to engage earlier. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will clearly pose a much bigger threat and echoes the same fascism as Hitler. Peace, he has advocated loud and clear, will only come from the destruction of the U.S.
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Damian Erasmus
UNM alumnus
