Firestorm: Since the introduction of mass bombing campaigns in World War II, the line between the justifiable and the grotesque has grown twisted. Late in that war, Allied bombers razed Hamburg, Cologne, and Dresden, though none truly represented military targets. The aim, said the Allies, was to decimate Nazi morale, and Germany was merely reaping what it had sown. Similarly, the dead and contaminated of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — perceived by some as subhuman “Japs” — fell victim to an obstinate military that refused to capitulate. This concept of the subhuman also permeated napalm attacks on countless Vietnamese villages and hamlets, the earliest incarnation of “back-to-the-Stone-Age” military strategy. As the luminous German writer W.G. Sebald once remarked about the carpet-bombing of Germany, the idea was to “stifle any attitude to life” among the surviving population. Cometh Gaza and Iran, in which the Sebald logic is again very much at play. Two heads of state are bombing indiscriminately because, to them, the messy ends justify the messy means, but this is déjà vu all over again in which the virtuous have every right to vanquish the brutal unwashed, no nuance need apply. Gaza Arabs and Islamic Persians are expendable in that the contours of their lives, like those of the Japanese and Vietnamese, are literally inconceivable to the Western mind. Americans are flexing newfound muscles while Israelis look ahead to annexations. Thus, the ruins of Gaza and Iran may now be added to those of Germany, Japan, and Vietnam, the morality of aerial bombing no clearer now than it was 80 years ago. More’s the pity.