Tom Cotton's Vicious and Despicable Rhetoric

World War Two was a cautionary tale of the devastation caused by total war, not an instruction manual for how to fight today.

Tom Cotton loves war crimes and wants more of them:

In the Spring of 1945, we did much, much worse in Dresden and Tokyo than anything Israel has done in Gaza—and it was justified.

The Biden Administration is in overdrive to pressure Israel not to take the steps necessary to deal with the existential terror threat from Hamas.

It is true that mass bombing of German and Japanese cities in WWII was much worse than what has been happening in Gaza in terms of both intensity and total casualties, but they were undeniably atrocities and after the war the nations of the world committed to outlawing these tactics. The bombings of Dresden and Tokyo were particularly gruesome and appalling, and it speaks volumes about Cotton and others like him that he approves of them.

The Second World War was a horror show in which at least forty million civilians alone perished along with tens of millions of soldiers. When it was over, the nations of the world resolved that wars would not be fought with such reckless disregard for civilian life again. The international agreements that were created in the wake of the war to protect civilian life in time of war exist because people that lived through that war understood that it should never be repeated. World War Two was a cautionary tale of the devastation caused by total war, not an instruction manual for how to fight today. You do not get to claim the moral high ground while simultaneously endorsing some of the most brutal and unjust tactics on record.