Richard K. Betts Quotes
… war by its nature entails terrible injustice to many individuals and that acceptance of that injustice as the lesser evil is implicit in any decision to send the military into combat.
Richard K. Betts, Professor and Director of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies and Columbia University “American Force”, Political Science Quarterly, Fall, 2012f
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Mahathir, in his moral assessment, fails to come to grips with the fact that the Coalition forces in their Afghan and Iraq activities attempt to kill and injure as few people as possible to accomplish their objective. The terrorists attempt to kill and injure as many people as possible. In the September 11 attack, the buildings could have been attacked late at night so there would be few casualties, and in Bali they could have bombed the facility after it had closed instead of waiting until there was the largest audience. And the terrorist bombs include nails, rat poison, and other additional material designed not to do more building damage, but to kill and maim more people which is their specific objective. Most wars have collateral damage and the parties are required to make a good faith attempt to minimize that. But the terrorists not only make no attempt, but make strong efforts to kill as many as possible. That is a huge moral and ethical distinction.
Bombing had reached the point where conventional bombing raids on industrial cities like Tokyo and Hamburg produced even more civilian casualties than did the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. Tibbets’ view, through the lens of hindsight, was developed by many of the Allied servicemen who had been forced into war by expansionist and militaristic nations like Japan and Germany both of which placed much of their war material manufacturing capability in the midst of their otherwise civilian cities. Both brutally violated the laws of war and committed atrocities many times over before the allies began retaliating. There are still some who believe that it was wrong to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. Some even feel that the mass bombing of Japanese and German cities in retaliation and in furtherance of the war effort was morally wrong. But at the time, the millions of casualties anticipated in the invasion of the Japanese mainland, persuaded virtually every American soldier and civilian that there was nothing wrong with use of the Atomic bomb, and many saw it as an absolute Godsend to prevent all the American and Japanese causalities that would have come otherwise. Many scholars remark on how it was virtually impossible to find any significant number of misgivings before or just after Hiroshima. Tibbet’s view was typical.
The Seminole Wars were one of the low points in American military behavior. With the specific permission of Commanding General Jesup, the soldiers were to loot the homes and personal possessions of the enemy civilians as well as fighters, but he favored extermination and there were many atrocities. He even seized the Seminole Leaders who had been invited for Peace Talks.
There was extensive hostility expressed by civilian populations in Pakistan and other countries where the United States made Drone strikes to take out terrorist leaders. However, there was much anti-American feeling in Pakistan before the Drone strikes.
Richard Kevin Betts is an American political scientist and international relations scholar who centers on U.S. foreign policy. He is currently the Arnold Saltzman Professor of War and Peace Studies in the Department of Political Science, the director of the International Security Policy Program in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and former director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies.
