The Volokh Conspiracy - What an Interesting Article:

I just ran across this item on NEXIS, from the October 15, 1943 New York Times:

President Roosevelt announced today that the Allied forces are withdrawing from Italy. "Regrettably, our forces have now killed over 24,000 Italians, both soldiers and civilians who died in attacks on military targets," the President said in a prepared statement. "This puts Italian deaths at ten times our deaths at Pearl Harbor — and the Italians weren't even the attackers there, though they declared war on us after the Japanese attack. More importantly, while no exact figures are available, we suspect that Italian civilian deaths caused by our invasion are now roughly ten times the number of our civilian deaths at Pearl Harbor.

"We feel that continuing the invasion of Italy, which will likely incidentally kill more civilians, will cause harm disproportional to the harm Italy's allies have inflicted on us. We therefore feel morally obligated to declare a ceasefire. We are sure that the Italians have learned their lesson and that they won't engage in unjustified attacks again; and in any event, international law and simple morality require us to desist. Only an evil Zionist nation would ever retaliate against an act of war in a way that creates civilian casualties disproportional to those that were inflicted on it.

"Naturally, if the Italian military had had the foresight to place its forces chiefly interspersed with the civilian population, we would have had to stop even earlier, because we would have long since passed the acceptably proportional level of incidental civilian casualties. And of course if we find that we have killed a comparable number of Germans and Japanese civilians, we will promptly cease fire as well. We're sure that the world will thank us for our humaneness."

I did not know that!

	[Eugene Volokh, July 31, 2006 at 1:00pm] Trackbacks What an Interesting Article: I just ran across this item on NEXIS, from the October 15, 1943 New York Times: President Roosevelt announced today that the Allied forces are withdrawing from Italy. "Regrettably, our forces have now killed over 24,000 Italians, both soldiers and civilians who died in attacks on military targets," the President said in a prepared statement. "This puts Italian deaths at ten times our deaths at Pearl Harbor — and the Italians weren't even the attackers there, though they declared war on us after the Japanese attack. More importantly, while no exact figures are available, we suspect that Italian civilian deaths caused by our invasion are now roughly ten times the number of our civilian deaths at Pearl Harbor. "We feel that continuing the invasion of Italy, which will likely incidentally kill more civilians, will cause harm disproportional to the harm Italy's allies have inflicted on us. We therefore feel morally obligated to declare a ceasefire. We are sure that the Italians have learned their lesson and that they won't engage in unjustified attacks again; and in any event, international law and simple morality require us to desist. Only an evil Zionist nation would ever retaliate against an act of war in a way that creates civilian casualties disproportional to those that were inflicted on it. "Naturally, if the Italian military had had the foresight to place its forces chiefly interspersed with the civilian population, we would have had to stop even earlier, because we would have long since passed the acceptably proportional level of incidental civilian casualties. And of course if we find that we have killed a comparable number of Germans and Japanese civilians, we will promptly cease fire as well. We're sure that the world will thank us for our humaneness." I did not know that!