More on Truman

I'm not well-read enough to justify any real organized or forceful opinion on Truman or the issues ScarShoulders brought up yesterday, but I had enough contrary opinions that I thought I'd jot some crap down and see we'll see where it takes us:

First, I know next to nothing about the formation of Israel - mostly just what a Jewish friend of mine told me in 15 minutes in a airport - but I don't think we can blame Truman for the location of Israel. After reading this shit, I'm convinced that that area was basically fucked one way or the other. There were already so many Jews flooding into Palestine that a third of population was Jewish by the end of WWII. And that's despite attempts by the British to slow the influx. So they were going to be there, and there were going to be conflicts, whether "Israel" was there or elsewhere. (As for Argentina as another possible location, I don't know where that comes from.)
Second, I think it's a little silly to blame all of our problems in the Middle East on the existence of Israel. First, we were always going to be involved in the area because our economy relies on oil.

Second, Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda seem to stem more from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, where our training of the mujihadeen was motivated by our Cold War-based wish to see the Soviets fail. Sure, you could argue that the reason Al Qaeda was formed and sustained from the 1980s until now is partly a byproduct of the continued animosity between Israel and the Arab world. But I think the Gulf War and our continued presence because of oil interests would have been sufficient even without Israel in the picture.

Third, I don't think we can blame Truman for the Cold War. At the end of World War II, there were two superpowers forming in the world - even as the war was coming to a close, both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. knew it. And with two distinct styles of government, that rivalry was definitely happening one way or the other. (Though we probably didn't have to go quite so insane everytime some random country chose a socialist form of government.)
Fourth, I am dubious about the extent to which the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had an impact on others wanting or not wanting the bombs. The idea of the technology was already out - the concept of a fissile chain reaction was widely known in scientific circles, the British knew about it, the Germans were working on it and might have beat us to it if not for some sweet sabotage by the Allies, and the Soviets had a spy on the Manhattan Project. Proliferation was going to happen, and in fact was happening even before the bombs were dropped.

Somewhat unrelatedly, while it pains me to say this, because I visited Hiroshima last year and what happened there was a terrible tragedy, I can't help but wonder if the outcomes (thus far) of the nuclear age aren't about as good as we could have hoped for. I figure that the minimum number of times that the bomb would have been dropped would be 1 - it seems very likely that, without an example incident to serve as a warning of the destructive power of the bomb (which Hiroshima and Nagasaki became) that someone, sometime would have used a nuclear weapon since then. I suppose it's possible that, had two powers developed the weapons simultaneously, we might have been able to maintain a fragile equilibrium similar to that which occurred during the Cold War without anyone using the weapons. But we came damn near mutual annihilation even knowing how much destruction these weapons would wreak, so I'm skeptical that we could have avoided someone using one. So with that said, two attacks relatively early in the development cycle (i.e. before the development of hydrogen bombs) is actually relatively high on the scale of possible outcomes from no attacks to elimination of humanity. With all that said, Truman certainly doesn't deserve any credit for all of this, since (1) he didn't know how this would all turn out and (2) almost certainly wasn't thinking about 60 years down the line anyway. And even knowing what we know now, I think you can argue without much difficulty that Nagasaki was a poor decision in both the short and long term, since the benefit in either case was minimal: I'm sure we could have pointed to Hiroshima and gotten the Emperor to agree to step down, and I don't see any reason why a lunatic who isn't swayed by Hiroshima would be swayed by Nagasaki.

Again, all relatively uninformed opinions. But how could any GCotC nominee not come from Nazi Germany, or one of the many other genocides from around the world? (Though I suppose you could argue that the atomic bombs - not to mention the fire bombing - represented a form of genocide. But then this post is so long that no one outside of ScarShoulders is going to read it anyway.)