Tirman's Role In The Cold War

Tirman rightly charges the US with callously contemplating the use of nuclear weapons against Korean and Chinese targets, but acknowledges their role in the Cold War world only in a single paragraph (66–67). Americans were frightened as well as belligerent, and rollback advocates took the Soviet threat seriously enough to plan to sacrifice the lives of Americans, many of whom preferred to be dead rather than red. The first two sections of Tirman's argument cannot be separated; the frontier mentality that drove America to wage wars explains its behavior during them. But, his potted American history does not satisfactorily account for the killing of German, Japanese, and Italian civilians in World War II.

America’s general acceptance of civilian deaths

Our ability and our willingness to stop or reverse communism or Islamic fundamentalism, the costs of doing so, the lessons we will teach the rest of the cowering world, and our own sense of self-worth. If large numbers of civilians die, that is a moral debt on the ledger of the North Koreans and Chinese, the North Vietnamese, and the Muslim jihadists, since the United States is reacting to their provocations. (354) More generally, while Tirman exonerates "the individual soldier, marine, sailor, or airman" as the product of "acculturation, training, vulnerability, and command" (15), he downplays the intensity of the struggle of many combatants with the very issues he addresses. Specifically, the contradictions between ideals and practice, law and circumstance, and discourse and reality. Soldiers naturally value their own safety above that of enemy civilians. Just as frightened countries go to war unnecessarily, frightened soldiers spray munitions where they should not. Every army has its share of moral cretins, fools, and psychopaths as well as far greater numbers of decent people trapped in fundamentally indecent