A 98 year old Japanese war pilot is fighting for peace. He has serious concerns about Japan's move to modify its pacifist constitution 70 years after the end of World War II.
“I fought the war from the cockpit of a Zero, and can still remember the faces of those I killed,” said Mr. Harada, who said he was able to meet and befriend some of his foes who survived the war. “They were fathers and sons, too. I didn’t hate them or even know them.”
“That is how war robs you of your humanity,” he added, “by putting you in a situation where you must either kill perfect strangers or be killed by them.”
The pilot, Kaname Harada, said that politicians born after World War II do not have an appreciation for the horrors of war:
“These politicians were born after the war, and so they don’t understand it must be avoided at all costs,” he said. He sat on a tatami mat in his living room, which is decorated with pictures of aircraft and an aluminum fragment from the Zero in which he was shot down in 1942. “In this respect, they are like our prewar leaders.”
Similar concerns are shared by many Japanese, as the nation approaches the 70th anniversary of the war’s end. Warnings about the passing of the war generation have been voiced all the way up to Crown Prince Naruhito, 55, who in February urged his nation to “correctly pass down tragic experiences and history to the generations who have no direct knowledge of the war, at a time memories of the war are about to fade.”
At 98 years old, Mr. Harada is increasingly in demand as a public speaker. He was a hero in World War II, downing at least 19 allied fighters. However, the trauma of those experiences has always stayed with him.
In the meantime, Judith Miller is continuing to play the martyr over Iraq. In her recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, she is pointing the finger of blame at everyone but herself. It was all the intelligence community's fault. The Bush Administration was too secretive.
Miller tries to get into a semantics discussion about whether Bush and Cheney were lying. It doesn't matter if they were or weren't. We know that Bush believed that an apocalypse was imminent and that it was his role to bring about the end times. There were other factors that influenced Bush. He claimed before he was elected that Saddam was responsible for an attempt on his father's life in 1994 during a visit to Saudi Arabia, a claim that he repeats in his book, "Decision Points." Many wars throughout history have started because of personal vendettas. The other is that Bush and Cheney were both oil men and occupying Iraq would further their oil interests. It should not be surprising if they did lie given that truth is the first casualty in war.
Even if Saddam had WMD's like Judith Miller claims, there was no reason to go to war in the first place. Saddam was being effective contained by the regime of sanctions and no-fly zones, and was no longer a threat to either Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. The failure of the uprising after the First Gulf War along with the widespread civilian casualties during the war and afterwards thanks to the food sanctions meant that no reasonable person could assume that the Iraqis would welcome us with open arms. We should have learned this lesson from our Revolution; no matter how bad of a person Saddam was, there was no justification for us to go into Iraq without the consent of the governed.
While we know that Bush relied on flawed intelligence estimates and crackpot conspiracy theories such as the Saddam-Al-Qaeda connection, the Niger Yellowcake Theory, and the Axis of Evil Theory as his public justification, we know that Bush had made up his mind that he was going to go to war with Iraq no matter what. A personal score had to be settled. And in his version of born-again Christianity, Bush believed he was fulfilling his role in bringing about the apocalypse. Miller does not take into account that Bush had decided that he was going into Iraq no matter what.
We know how Iraq has turned out. Around 1 million civilians killed, 5,000+ of our troops lost, tens of thousands more struggling with war wounds and PTSD, and a major power vacuum in Iraq that has been filled by a much more dangerous terrorist group in ISIS than even Bin Laden. And thanks to Bush's diversion, it took another 10 years for us to kill Bin Laden.
But none of that matters for Miller, who in the grand American tradition, is now going into print in an effort to gin up more support for perpetual warfare and to blame everybody else but herself. And the contrast between Mr. Harada and Judith Miller is similar to night and day. Harada is actively working to keep his country out of any more wars at the age of 98. Miller, on the other hand, is actively aiding and abetting possible future war crimes and refusing to own up to the war crimes that she helped commit.