Not who we are

There was a phrase that President Obama used on a regular basis that was never challenged because it was warm and fuzzy and made us feel good and this phase worded slightly different has come up with the nomination of Gina Haspel for CIA director. It centers around water boarding which is called by some enhanced interrogation and by others torture. President Obama when referring to water boarding would say that is not who we are. Now they say we are above that and both are wrong. We can avoid torture as long as the danger is far enough away and not likely to directly effect us here at home but we only need go back to WW2 to find out what we might do when push comes to shove. When we felt that the Axis Powers might take over the world we were not so warm and fuzzy in our response. Cities throughout German and Japan were fire bombed with incendiaries. These were weapons designed to cause large fires which burned entire cities. The goal was to kill civilians and thus demoralize the enemy. Yes we deliberately killed women and children in order to win the war and protect the home land. On the evening of February 13, 1945, a series of Allied firebombing raids begins against the German city of Dresden, reducing the “Florence of the Elbe” to rubble and flames, and killing as many as 135,000 people. It was the single most destructive bombing of the war—including Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and all the more horrendous because little, if anything, was accomplished strategically, since the Germans were already on the verge of surrender. If you decide to go to war, go to win or stay home. We should have followed this advice in the many excursions into warlike action we have undertaken since WW 2.