When looking at this picture, the Curtis LeMay comment of bombing Vietnam back into the Stone Age comes to mind as this is exactly what Israel's doing to the Palestinians in Gaza.
LeMay’s deepest belief was that the only way to wage war seriously was through aerial bombardment to produce depopulated rubble, which meant he was later the one member of the Joint Chiefs whom President Kennedy had particularly to restrain during the Cuban Missile Crisis. LeMay’s later counsel, for waging the Vietnam War, delivered in his 1965 autobiography, was “Bomb them back into the Stone Age.”We dropped way more tonnage on Vietnam than we had on Germany in World War II, but the country was simply too big to realize LeMay’s hopes and dreams. Gaza, however, is spatially tiny—about 60 percent the size of Chicago (not metro Chicago, just the city proper). It can indeed be bombed, if not literally, into the Stone Age, then to a state where nearly all its structures have been disaggregated into stones and shards of glass and steel.
And that’s precisely what the Israeli government has done. Facing a similar strategic conundrum to the one we faced in Vietnam—the indistinguishable scattering of military targets (Hamas) amid the general population—Israel has gone one better than we did with our “free-fire zones” that designated whole swaths of Vietnam as suitable for bombardment. We were held back, of course, not just by the size of the country but also by the fact that we were fighting on behalf of some of the Vietnamese people, with a South Vietnamese army at our side. Israel has felt, and conducted its war with, no such constraints.
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