Aleppo 2 days ago, Dec. 14, 2016, from NYTimes article: “Battle Over Aleppo Is Over, Russia Says, as Evacuation Deal Reached”
Dresden, Germany, after U.S. and Allied firebombing Feb 13, 1945, from The Atlantic Photo, “Remembering Dresden: 70 Years After the Firebombing” (i.e. 4 megatons of incendiary bombs intended to cause fire)
Hiroshima, Japan, from The Atlantic Photo, “Hiroshima: Before and After the Atomic Bombing.” This photo is “after” in case it is not obvious.
Which is worse: The U.S. & Britain? … Or Russia & Syria?
The pictures are fair. I got the Aleppo photo from the NYT, which “promised” to be unbiased after it failed (like everyone else) to predict a Trump win in Nov. 2016. You do need to check sources. Shira Rubin writing for AOL News / vocative ran an article yesterday “Fake images of horror in Aleppo spread on social media.”
Obama press secretary Josh Earnest said Dec. 13th regarding Syria: “I think it demonstrates once again the tactics that the Russians are using in support of the regime are something that is truly beyond the pale, could not be any different than the types of tactics that we utilize.” (Copy & Paste from White House press website) I think he meant to say “could not be [more] different.” Was it a Freudian slip? Because the above photos show very graphically that the U.S. has gone far beyond Aleppo when it was convenient.
Yes. Convenient. The U.S. and Britain were perfectly capable of taking out just the war factories in Dresden. But the Germans would have been able to more easily shoot down planes flying or diving low enough for precision bombing. We would have had a few hundred more casualties, maybe a few thousand.
It was an effective strategy from that standpoint. Whereas the typical bombing mission had previously had a 1 in 25 chance of being shot down, out of 1296 heavy bombers and 784 P-51 Mustang escorts, 8 planes were shot down, an improvement to 1 in 250. The bombing run was 5 times safer than flying on the Shuttle (about 1 in 50 crashes). 25,000 people died. (reference)
The casualties in Aleppo over 4 years of aerial bombardment were 11,233, about half of one bombing run over Dresden. The TOTAL casualties over that period were 31,010. (reference) It appears that the final bombing was relatively benign compared to Dresden. On Nov. 20th after particularly intense bombing, Al Jazeera reported 240 total casualties. Several cease fires were called by the Russians allowing people to leave. Do you think the U.S. and Britain gave Dresden any notice? Much less a cease fire and chance to leave?
The idea for this analysis emerged from many conversations with B.G. Smith, who served in the U.S. military and was stationed in Germany after WWII and married a German woman. In getting to know her family he was regaled with many tales of bombing raids and pedestrians being shot by enemy (i.e. US and British) aircraft, no matter whether they were civilian or not, no matter whether they were children or not.
I thought, as the last of the WWII participants left public life, who will honestly remember? The country will really get messed up now. My dad would not even talk about what he saw in the aftermath of nuking two Japanese cities. But the photo above gives an idea. No warning was given for Hiroshima either.
By comparison, the Russian action in Syria brought about a relatively humane end to an interminable conflict in which people were dying for four years. There were worries that the bombing strategy would be repeated in other rebel held territories. But instead Russia announced: “The next step is to reach an agreement on a total ceasefire across the whole of Syria. We are conducting very active negotiations with representatives of the armed opposition, brokered by Turkey.” Even John Kerry said he was “encouraged” by the cease-fire arrangements.
In case you have forgotten, the U.S. press has long been at the beck and call of the CIA, willingly or unwillingly, wittingly or unwittingly, to run whatever news fits the U.S. agenda. They are no better than the Russian press, which is pretty low. The Russians are no pussyfoot sweethearts. But the U.S. government is lying and propagandizing as bad or worse. Neither country’s citizens are fully aware. But the US seems to be getting worse.
At ShulerResearch, we tell the whole truth – not just the convenient parts of it!
We even name sources and show our evidence when we catch things like:
- Google suppressing search results they don’t like
- The press naming race on one side of a shootout but not the other
- The US cyber-attacking Russian banks (more about that tomorrow)
- Chinese-made cars already on sale in the U.S.
And we give insight no one else has:
Shuler Research 
Robert,
Your thoughts are extremely interesting. Also, it is making me ‘re-think’ some ideas I have about Syria but this is very hard to do.
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Probably they are thoughts planted by media wonks since you have never been to Syria. None of them are old enough to have seen real war, not even Vietnam in most cases. Afghanistan and Iraq were very limited wars in which American soldiers were sacrificed to limit casualties among civilians. Didn’t work. They still gripe about casualties, and both countries are unstable. There is a chance Syria will settle down now that the rebels know the alternative.
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