Rizwan Khan, Murabbi Silsila, Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, USA
During my public education in the United States, I was not taught that President Truman was a war criminal for ordering the nuclear bombing of civilian populations. I was not taught that our government committed war crimes when we deliberately burned tens of thousands of women and children alive in Japan. I was not taught that those responsible should have faced justice and been prosecuted in the way we made war tribunals for the Germans.
Children raised in the United State’s public education system are taught to believe that the moral justifications for mass murdering those civilians can be a perfectly legitimate perspective.
The indoctrination of the American education system numbed our minds from childhood, and it showed its effects when the time to justify more atrocities came again. We’ve been ready to rationalise war crimes from a time that we may no longer recall when that rationale was put in our minds.
In a study conducted in 2017, researchers presented a hypothetical scenario to a representative set of Americans. The scenario was that Iran responded to sanctions and attacked a US aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, killing 2,403 military personnel (the same number killed in the Pearl Harbor attack). The US responded with large scale airstrikes that destroyed all of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, air defenses, and all Iranian Air Force bases and planes. The US then began a ground invasion. The invasion eventually stalled, with 10,000 US military casualties. The President of the United States was presented with two options to end the war. The first option was to continue the land invasion to capture Tehran and overthrow the Iranian government. The second option was to “shock” the Iranian government into accepting unconditional surrender by dropping a single nuclear weapon on Mashhad, Iran’s second-largest city.
The result of the study was that, “when considering the use of nuclear weapons, the majority of Americans prioritise protecting US troops and achieving American war aims, even when doing so would result in the deliberate killing of millions of foreign noncombatants.
“What was surprising was the number of Americans who suggested that Iranian civilians were somehow culpable or were less than human.
“We were not surprised by the finding that most Americans place a higher value on the life of an American soldier than the life of a foreign noncombatant. What was surprising, however, was the radical extent of that preference. Our experiments suggest that the majority of Americans find a 1:100 risk ratio to be morally acceptable. They were willing to kill 2 million Iranian civilians to save 20,000 U.S. soldiers.”
The study concluded, “these findings highlight the limited extent to which the U.S. public has accepted the principles of just war doctrine and suggest that public opinion is unlikely to be a serious constraint on any president contemplating the use of nuclear weapons in the crucible of war.
“The U.S. public’s willingness to use nuclear weapons and deliberately kill foreign civilians has not changed as much since 1945 as many scholars have assumed. Contrary to the nuclear taboo thesis, a majority of Americans are willing to support the use of a nuclear weapon against an Iranian city killing 100,000 civilians. Contrary to the theory that Americans accept the noncombatant immunity norm, an even larger percentage of the U.S. public was willing to kill 100,000 Iranian civilians with conventional weapons. Women are as hawkish as men and, in some scenarios, are even more willing to support the use of nuclear weapons. Belief in the value of retribution is strongly related to support for using nuclear weapons, and a large majority of those who favor the use of nuclear weapons against Iran stated that the Iranian people bore some of the responsibility for that attack because they had not overthrown their government.
“Nevertheless, these surveys do tell us something unsettling about the instincts of the U.S. public concerning nuclear weapons and noncombatant immunity. When provoked, and in conditions where saving U.S. soldiers is at stake, the majority of Americans do not consider the first use of nuclear weapons a taboo, and their commitment to noncombatant immunity in wartime is shallow. Instead, a majority of Americans prioritise winning the war quickly and saving the lives of U.S. soldiers, even if that means killing large numbers of foreign noncombatants.
“Past surveys that show a very substantial decline in U.S. public support for the 1945 dropping of the atomic bombs are a misleading guide to how the public would react if placed in similar wartime circumstances in the future.
“Today, as in 1945, the U.S. public is unlikely to serve as a serious constraint on any president who might consider using nuclear weapons in the crucible of war.
“As in 1945, a significant portion of the U.S. public today would want to use nuclear weapons against an enemy that attacked the United States even when presented with a diplomatic option to end the war. For this significant portion of the U.S. public, there is no atomic aversion. Atomic attraction prevails.”
This brings us to a difficult question about ourselves that starts in American history and brings us to our present: how do we classify the actions committed during World War II by the “Greatest Generation?”
The definition of terrorism is, “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” Terrorism is to deliberately try to terrorise a civilian population to force capitulation.
When we dropped nuclear bombs on civilian populations, we knew what we were doing. It was not a case of collateral damage where we aimed at a military target and civilians were unintentionally harmed. Rather, we knew we were targeting civilians. We deliberately chose to burn tens of thousands of women and children alive.
If, as a national conscience, we in the United States believe that moral justifications for this can be a legitimate perspective, then we won’t find it difficult to adopt a similar line of thinking today: “If it was okay for us to bomb Japanese children, then why not bomb Muslim children?” It is a deeply flawed conclusion, but it is logically consistent with what we have been raised to believe. In the conflict between Israel and Palestine that we are witnessing today, nothing new has been revealed about our capacity to justify killing civilians.
The teachings of the Holy Quran provide a moral compass that establishes parameters of right and wrong. The Holy Quran teaches:
“And fight in the cause of Allah against those who fight against you, but do not transgress. Surely, Allah loves not the transgressors.” (Surah al-Baqarah, Ch.2: V.191)
Islam respects each nation’s right to defend itself, but restricts people from transgressing the bounds of basic decency. The Holy Prophetsa exemplified this teaching by never allowing the killing of civilians, by never transgressing the code of conduct that Islam requires of any decent human being.
The reality is that the West is and always has been capable of using nuclear weapons on civilians in the Middle-East. The reason is that neither the public nor the leadership are on an ethical standard where they would have a fundamental moral objection to the mass killing of women and children.