It’s quite obvious that President Bush, and no one in his administration, knows how to end the war in Iraq. Bush doesn’t even know how to start a war: he bungled it from beginning. It took the war-obsessed neocons to show Bush how to start this war, and now we discover that not even the war-hungry neocons know how to stop it once it’s started.

Commonsense tells this writer that if the neocons, who are mostly very bright, but untrustworthy people, don’t have the answer to stopping this God-awful war in Iraq, who does?  I’ll tell you who does, President Harry S. Truman does. And although old hot-to-trot Harry is no longer with us, his spirit is and we’d be damn fools if we didn’t take advantage of it.

President Truman, wherefore art thou?

For those of you not old enough to know, or too senile to remember, President Truman had a proven technique for ending a war. It took a new kind of weapon and a lot of guts, but Harry had both.

In World War II, after we defeated the Germans we concentrated on Japan. Truman knew that after fighting the Japanese army in the jungles of the South Pacific islands for several years Japan probably could not be defeated without invading the homeland itself. But he also knew that invading Japan would cost many thousands of American lives.

Meantime, American scientists had perfected the atomic bomb, so President Truman had a decision to make. Should he order the Army to invade Japan, or should he drop an atom bomb on the country and settle this thing once and for all?

Knowing that the A-bomb had an unbelievable blasting power equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT---or the full bomb load of 2,410 Super Fortress aircraft--- Truman sent a message to Japan that it would soon feel the weight of America’s new, vastly improved weapon of utter destruction, and no installation above ground could stand against it.

“Further,” Truman said, “we plan to wipe out Japan’s war industry to the last vestige. We shall completely destroy the power of the Japanese people to make war.” And with that, he ordered an atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. That was on August 3.1945. Six days later, after getting no response from Japanese warlords, Truman ordered another A-bomb to be dropped on Nagasaki, which had a population 253,000, slightly less than that of Hiroshima. A mushroom cloud 40,000 feet high hid both cities from view for more than 24 hours and the frightful human casualty and burn count numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

After much hemming and hawing, Japan finally surrendered unconditionally on August 15,1945 and World War II was over. Since that time, of course, we significantly advanced our destruction capability with development of the nuclear bomb which is thousands of times more powerful than the crude atomic bomb.

Now, the questions is, if Harry Truman were our President today, what would he do about the turmoil in the Middle East, and the chaos in Iraq, in particular?  How might he stop the fighting in Iraq immediately, and quell the violence in the entire South Asia region for good?  After studying Truman’s thought processes: how and why he made the decision to drop the atomic bombs, I submit to you what I think President Truman might do.

First, President Truman would issue this warning to the Middle East, but pointed at the most dangerous and war-inclined nations; “The heart of America is dedicated to the proposition that all nations can, and should, live in peace with each other. To demonstrate what the U.S. can do, as the most powerful nation on earth--- if wars and conflicts do not stop immediately--- within the next two days we shall drop nuclear bombs at pin-pointed, sparsely inhabited areas of several war-making countries to show you the awesome destructive power in these incredible nuclear devices that some of you are now thoughtlessly playing around with.

Second, President Truman would immediately follow his first announcement with this one:  “I have ordered nuclear bombs to be dropped on the mostly uninhabited, but accessible, regions of the most aggressive Middle East nations. We mean as little destruction and human suffering as possible. However these massive detonations will demonstrate how easily the U.S. could wipe any nation off the map, forever destroying its means of making war. “And let’s be clear, I, as President will order the nuclear destruction of any aggressive nation that insists on continuing to invade or otherwise intimidate its neighbors. I stopped Japan from making war in 1945 and I have even more powerful means, and rational reason for stopping wars today. I therefore urge all government officials from warring countries to visit the sites of what a nuclear detonation can do. Then change your foreign policy accordingly, or have it happen to you.”

Third, President Truman would then drop nuclear bombs on the borders of Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. Next would come Syria, then Ethiopia, then Somalia, then at the “no man’s land” between Lebanon and Israel. No Middle East nation would be exempt from seeing and feeling the hell of what a nuclear explosion can do.

Fourth, “As President of the United States I now suggest that all warring nations lay down their arms and attempt contact and reconciliation with their neighbors. If this is not evident to us within 30 days we will begin a systematic destruction of the major facilities by nuclear bombs in each offending nation until peace is assured. I stopped a war and brought peace to the world in 1945 with the atom bomb; and if I have to, I will use the nuclear bomb to bring peace to the world in 2007. 

This will be considered by many readers as a hoax, a fantasy, a sick joke, an impossibility, or even the ravings of an over-active imagination. But can any sane person reading this article honestly say that Truman’s solution is any more unthinkable than the unconscionable slaughter that is going on in many Middle East nations today?

James T. Moore
http://jamestmoore.us/