Washington has a love affair with terror

Many questions remain unasked as the U.S. continues its war on terrorism. One is whether Washington possesses the moral right to condemn terrorism when its own hands are so bloody.

Let's examine our use of terror directed against civilians to achieve political or military goals, beginning with the atomic devastation of Japan. "Little Boy," exploded over Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, killed 130,000 people immediately (including a dozen U.S. POWs) and 200,000 within five years, all but some 20,000 of them civilians. Twenty-five square miles of civilization were gutted.

"Fat Man," detonated over Nagasaki three days later, took another 70,000 lives immediately, and nearly double that over five years. All but 150 were civilians.

That's the equivalent of 50 World Trade Centers of people vaporized.

When the Korean War erupted in 1950, the U.S. worked on perfecting this criminal way of waging war, the targeting of a country's civilian population. Gen. Douglas MacArthur ordered that every "installation, factory, city and village" be destroyed in much of the north. Gen. Curtis LeMay reported that "over a period of three years or so ... we burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea, too."

Three million civilians died in that conflict, a large majority from American bombing. That's the equivalent of another 750 World Trade Centers full of the dead.