I’ve been reading Respectful Insolence for quite a while now, but I somehow missed Orac’s post critiquing Richard Dawkins’ comments on Arthur Harris and the bombing of civilians in the Second World War, and how the development of precision-guided munitions (“smart bombs”) reflects a change in the moral zeitgeist since then. Fortunately, Jonathan Dresner pointed […]
30 Sqn D.H.9A at 9700 ft over Peri Magurum. A friend has alerted me to a thread on the Something Awful forums (thanks, Mike!) One of the users has access to a collection of photos taken by an RAF sergeant who served with 30 Squadron in the early 1920s, which unfortunately looks like it is
Between the wars, it was a commonplace that poison gas would be used in the next war, would be used in large quantities, and would probably be used against civilians. This was a natural enough assumption; after all, it was used liberally enough in the Great War, and it was widely assumed that science would
OK, I promise to stop doing that. This time, the answer seems to be: probably … Coming via Charlie’s Diary is a New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh on the new US exit strategy in Iraq, which reports that “A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that
Well, not really. Still, it’s an interesting parallel. A RAF officer, Flight-Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith, is being court-martialled for refusing to serve in Iraq. A doctor, he has already served two tours there; now he thinks that the war itself was illegal, in that it was not authorised by the United Nations. This is reminiscent of
