[Terrorism, Biological Warfare] Japan rejects germ warfare claim

Japan rejects germ warfare claim:

"A Japanese court rejects claims for compensation by Chinese victims of biological warfare during WWII."

Marc Says: Yet another case of "moral relativism" pertaining to WWII, where the evil Americans started the war by embargoing oil to the Japanese, forcing the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor, and then needlessly perpetrated horrible nuclear attacks on the Japanese -- but the Japanese did not do anything wrong in conducting germ warfare experiments on Chinese citizens.

I suspect this will indeed go all the way up to the UN and I will be very interested to see what happens there. I view the UN as somewhere between mostly dysfunctional and completely dysfunctional, but I always continue to hold out hope. The UN has the designed-for-failure problem that it only has representatives from nations, so groups which are not affiliated with nations (trans-national corporations, NGOs, and religions) have no seats and no representations. What an interesting and far more relevant-to-today's-world place the UN would be if the Catholic Pope, and the Shiia, the Sunni, for example, had seats and votes. Each of them would represent the views and interests of far more people that the vast majority of the small nations that do have seats at the UN.

I also suspect that the G8, the people who really do what we wish the UN did (broker agreements between world powers and help institute new rule sets) will begin to address the issue. I understand they are already starting to think about the next global pandemic (probably avian flu from SE Asia).

In particular, as the world refines its rule set to deal with terrorism and biological weapons of mass destruction, I think we need to carefully examine our current global rule set as it pertains to those who use biological agents. For example, if Islamic terrorists deploy biological agents in Russia, Europe, and/or the US, should Russia, Europe, and/or the US reply with nuclear strikes against Muslim holy cities? Colorado's Tom Tancredo has made the news recently proposing that the US might consider doing just that in the case of nuclear or dirty bomb attacks.

As I understand the Cold War (WWIII) rule set, the tacit understanding was that if the USSR deployed biological agents the US would respond with nuclear weapons. I also understand from Judith Miller's excellent book on biological weapons during Iraq 1, the US apparently told Saddam Hussein that if he deployed biological weapons (which, ironically, the US had originally given him, which he had deployed against the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq wars, and against which the US knew its troops did not have protection) against the US troops fighting to liberate Kuwait, the US would respond with nuclear weapons on Baghdad and other large Iraqi cities. Hussein wisely chose not to deploy his stocks of biological weapons and the US wisely chose to publicly pretend that it never intended to attack to Baghdad or institute "regime change", as Saddam Hussein in turn had signaled that if the US attacked toward Baghdad he (Hussein) would deploy his biological weapons.

The big difference was that in Iraq 1 the US knew who Saddam was and where he lived, and he knew the US knew. In WWIV (GWOT) we do not necessarily know exactly who the attackers are or where they hail from, or even if they represent a "country", or they may even be citizens of the country they attack (as was the case with the recent UK tube and bus bombings).

I see the US as slowly beginnig to revise its rule sets from that of helpless victim of a biological or nuclear attack (gosh, we don't know who did it so there is nothing we can do but be victims) to a position where we start to hold broader communities responsible for controlling the behavior of their extremist sub-groups. I see the British taking the first steps in this direction as they tell their indigenous Muslim community that they were not responsible for the attacks and they are responsible for helping root out the extremist terrorists, rather than just wringing their hands and loudly proclaiming that they (the Muslim community) are victims too. I see similar movement in the US as well (Tancredo's recent comments not withstanding).