The entire war is a crime, but if it consisted exclusively of sinking Iranian ships while they were manned and underway it would be so much less bad than it is.
07.03.2026 03:55
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The entire war is a crime, but if it consisted exclusively of sinking Iranian ships while they were manned and underway it would be so much less bad than it is.
which is why starting an illegal war is a big deal, because it comes with all these costs without the things that make it broadly defensible
Imagine i said "military personnel" if that makes you feel better.
Yeah, its not a constitutionally valid declaration of war from a US law perspective, but if we were a dictatorship and that didn't matter im not sure how much more of a war declaration would be given.
Im not really sure what I said to warrant the hostility tbh. In terms of terrible stuff that's happened in this war the sinking of an Iranian warship is so far down the list it barely bears mentioning.
It acted as a warship because that's what warships do. Surrender in the face of bad odds before you've even engaged the enemy is usually considered cowardice. "Why didn't they do the in retrospect logically optimal thing?" Well because they didn't, though ive seen reports that it was being debated
The usual reasons, duty, love of country, ideological commitment to the cause, professional pride. Soldiers do very risky stuff all the time.
We also dont know that they were unarmed or low on ammo, AFAIK that's sourced off of one random tweet.
So is where I feel the need to remind folks that the selective service system still exists.
But in practice, yeah. Super-lazy back-of-the-envelope, holding all of Iran might require c. 600,000 ground troops. (~3x our max Iraq deployment).
But you also need rotations, so 2x or 3x that.
Probably enough Iranian expats in the US to account for that number.
No they were not, but the economy of Japan was the thing allowing those atrocities to continue, and given the sheer imprecision of contemporary weapons tech there simply wasn't a way to hit targets smaller than city-sized. I'm not going to argue it wasn't horrific, but it was a horrific war.
As I understand it *right now* if everyone stops shooting and insurers believe it's for real, mostly yes. But the longer it goes on the more production goes offline because turning a well off isnt like a tap, you can't turn it back on like nothing has changed. Often need to re-drill and the like.
Imperial Japan was bad. In fact it was much worse for Asians generally than for westerners. Ever asked a Chinese person about the atomic bombings?
You know who was mostly dying by 1945? It was Chinese and Thai and Malaysian civilians. The Japanese empire was a machine of death. Putting a stop to it by any means necessary was righteous. A month earlier might have saved a million lives, a month later cost another million.
Yes, under the conditions that they be allowed to keep occupying big parts of China. They were willing to make peace if they got to keep their empire. That's not really a negotiation in good faith and unsurprisingly no one took them up on it. Their own diplomats told leadership as much.
You're right, the decision wasn't particularly complex because it flowed form continued practice of doing violence to Japan until they quit. Total wars are nasty like that. Japan's leaders couldn't muster the moral courage to surrender until Aug 14th 1945.
Sorry I don't have a pithy quote by an antiwar activist to give you about a complex process. Turns out you need to actually read something longer than a BlueSky post to understand what happened.
Or, you know, go look at the wikipedia article, it really does a decent job.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrend...
This is actually a pretty good summary. The specific citation for it, btw, is Japanese.
We were pretty cagey about what exactly they were until after Hiroshima. At that point they convinced themselves that we probably only had the one until there was second.
You can go read the Japanese primary sources if you like. They in fact show the same record. The army launched a coup to try to prevent a surrender even when it finally happened. That's just a fact. That does not jive well with "willing to surrender".
THEN WHY DIDN'T THEY? They had a lot of opportunities and yet until the emperor intervened personally nothing happened.
If you read the whole thing you'll note that it points out that it nevertheless did "lubricate the process of peace". Do keep in mind that the strategic bombing survey was written by interviewing surviving enemy leaders and there's a lot of ass covering in there.
And not just any conditional surrender (arguably the final surrender was conditional with the condition being the emperor is retained) but rather the demand was for Japan to keep a significant percentage of its conquests. The allies correctly considered those terms ludicrous.
Almost like a full accounting of the end of the war requires more than a pithy sentence. The Wiki article is more or less correct though and much more accessible: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrend...
What else can i conclude when I am shown a single passage in a more general book that contradicts several extremely reputable and well regarded books studying the topic in detail?
I too can link you to a book by a well regarded scholar: www.amazon.com/Downfall-End...
I saw that bit from a book written by someone who clearly never read anything about it. How did they try?
How did they try? And why were they suddenly able to do so on August 14th when they couldn't before?
If the decision had been taken by all these leaders than why didn't Japan surrender before August 14th?
There was a coup attempt in Japan to prevent the surrender, the head of the Army killed himself because of it. None of this ia particularly obscure, the timeline is well known. Heck, the US was monitoring internal Japanese diplomatic traffic looking for hints of surrender.
That is not true. Truman paused conventional bombing after Nagasaki because they were waiting for a Japanese reply that almost didn't come. "The emperor " wasn't trying to cable Truman unsuccessfully. We know this because when the surrender was broadcast on August 14th hostilities ended immediately
[Citation needed]