U.S. Policy in the Persian Gulf

One statement in Clancy’s otherwise perceptive column appears open to question: “The extinction of a similar number (similar to the collective deaths of 300 terrorists) of civilian lives, many of them children’s lives, is a horror differing from the Holocaust in scale but not in substance.”

One wonders how could such a claim be reconciled with the subtitle of the column: “What if you do everything right and end up killing 300 civilians?” Surely, no reasonable person would claim that the Nazis did everything right and yet ended up doing what they did.

There is indeed a significant difference in “scale” between the two happenings--290 victims against 6 million. But what about the “substance?” Yes, if “substance” means that in both instances innocent people died, for those in the doomed aircraft are no less dead than those who died in the Holocaust. But if “substance” means what motivated the Nazis and what motivated the naval commander, if “substance” means respect or lack of respect for the sensible opinions of mankind, if “substance” means an overpowering sense of remorse and regret or the absence of it, then what substantive comparison can be made between the tragedy of the Holocaust and the tragic accident that took that Iranian airliner out of the skies?

EDWIN ROBERTS

San Marino