It is rare, sadly, to find someone interested in what the perspective of history has to teach us about current events, politicians seem particularly oblivious to this need. That being said, the bombing of German and Japanese cities during WWII as part of the Strategic Bombing campaign carried out by the British and American air forces offers us a much needed dose of morality regarding Western Civilization's (and these days, seemingly civilization in general) now fifteen years of actively fighting against those who would utilize terrorism for political/religious ends. Early on in the British attempt to bring the fighting to Germany after having evacuated the continent at Dunkirk, it was discovered that attempts to selectively hit targets such as factories producing munitions and armaments had failed miserably, as "Less than one-third of its bombers were dropping their loads within five miles of the specific industrial targets they were attacking." (from Williamson Murray, "Did Strategic Bombing Work?"). Failing to destroy the intended targets was compounded by the horrendous costs to the bomber crews paid to achieve such paltry results. Having failed to selectively target legitimate war-related targets, Bomber Command switched to "area bombing" hoping to "dehouse" the Germany urban population and break the morale of the Nazis by killing non-combatants because hitting the center of a city with firebombs is a much easier task that would certainly produce "results". Until the end of WWII, this policy was continued, with the Americans eventually attempting their own strategic bombing campaign and eventually joining in with the British to wipe German cities off the map (with the corresponding effort in the Pacific to demolish Japanese cities). Despite the horrific loss of life, hundreds of thousands of non-combatant men, women, and children killed, the will of the Germans and the Japanese to fight on never wavered.
In his essay on the effectiveness of the Strategic Bombing campaign in WWII, historian Williamson Murray wrote, "World War II was a matter of national survival, a war waged against a tyranny that represented a hideous moral and strategic danger. Consequently, any judgment on the Combined Bomber Offensive must rest on the grounds of
expediency rather than on those of
morality." In that essay, Murray seeks to establish that the bombing campaign was indeed effective in helping shorten WWII, but the vast majority of the evidence he presents revolves around actual strategic bombing of transportation networks and military targets (which was effective) rather than the indiscriminate destruction of cities (which was not). Why did the Allies target cities? Because they felt the need to do something, and this was what they could actually do. Plus, there was also the desire to punish the German and Japanese people for the actions of their political leadership and military, and the unspoken belief that the lives lost in the bombing campaign were a part of the cost of winning the war, thankfully, being paid by the other side.
How do we evaluate Williamson's claim, and what does this have to do with terrorism? The claim that any national emergency can set aside morality as the judge of our actions, and WWII was certainly a serious existential threat that is not in dispute, must still be categorically rejected by a Christian worldview. If we can abandon the principles by which we seek to imitate Christ when our lives or even our civilization is threatened, of what value are those principles? It is when we are being threatened or oppressed, as individuals, as a Church, and as a nation, that our feet should be most firmly planted on the solid rock of Christ. If we instead call a "timeout", wage war by any means necessary to protect ourselves, and then seek to put the genie in the bottle again afterwards, we will instead only discover that we ourselves have changed in the process of defeating our foe, and not for the better. I don't doubt for a moment the valor and service of the men who flew the bombers over Germany and Japan in WWII, but I cannot accept the defense of the strategy that sent them there to firebomb cities as being "necessary" at the time. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but it is also the author of immoral behavior.
The War on Terror that started, for most of our awareness of it at least, with the horror of 9/11 and the deaths of so many innocent people, cannot be allowed to devolve until we are little better in our actions than those we are seeking to destroy. We have already made mistakes and taken steps in that direction, the fact that politicians and talking heads debated whether or not torture should be one of the tools of our forces tells us as much. The shame of Abu Ghraib is another example, along with the ongoing secret targeting of threats with drone strikes, suggestions that we can solve the ISIS problem by "carpet bombing" Syria, and now the ludicrous suggestion by one political candidate that Muslims be banned from entering the United States.
Terrorism is not nearly the threat to Western Civilization that the fascism of the Nazis and Japanese was. Terrorism also is not nearly the threat to Western Civilization that Communism once was. Terrorism is psychologically disturbing, creating fear that never seems to dissipate, but all the world's terrorists and would-be terrorists have a comparatively tiny amount of power versus the threats that have already been defeated in the modern era. It would be a strategic mistake, and certainly an ethical one, if we allowed terrorism to change who we are, if we abandoned our optimism and desire to help those in need because of fear.
The morality taught to us by Jesus Christ is not an optional morality. We cannot put it on when useful and take it off when it gets uncomfortable. We must live, regardless of the threats against us, as disciples of Jesus Christ, the last thing we need to do is to start targeting the innocent alongside the guilty.
