Laos and Cambodia weren't participants in the war but that doesn't really feel like it matters all that much. Whenever I talk about the bombings of Cambodia and Laos with Americans (who - liberals and conservatives alike feel they must always defend) I sometimes here "well we bombed cities in Germany and Japan in WW2 and no one talks about those being war crimes". But were they? I really don't know much about those bombings. My gut says yes they were also war crimes but we just accept them because they were combatant countries?
They were war crimes, at least when saturation bombing, the question is did they help beat the fascists...the answer is "sometimes, but usually no and usually as a secondary objective to terror bombing". Dresden no, the Rhineland and Tokyo (more controversial since they knew the firestorm would murder most of the civilians and thought it was a good thing" probably yes since those really fucked the industrial and political capacity.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki....they probably speed the already forthcoming surrender up a week or two (and helped screw over the Soviets in negotiations), but that's hardly worth nuking an entire city.
So Bomber Harris might not be as "bad" as those who bombed innocent civilians fighting for their own liberation, but he certainly should have been up at the Hague.
Ultimately, the question when at war is not "does this piece of paper say it's bad?" But "does this destroy any concept of basic human dignity even more than war does?" And "does this bring this war to an end as swiftly as possible and with as few lives on either side lost as possible?
As a note of morbid interest, Bomber Harris did bomb innocent civilians fighting for their own liberation - in Iraq in the 1920s. He pioneered the concept of 'Strategic Bombing' by conducting was what then coined 'Aerial Policing' against Iraqi civilians - an attempt to conduct colonial policing (suppressing of independence movements) cheaper than convention methods.
Just a wonderful person I want to play Minecraft creative mode with.
I don't think there's a meaningful moral difference between Harris and any Nazi official. Harris just happened to win.
Agreed. The moral difference was at the social level where liberals are at least nominally better than genocidal fascists on a world conquest.
...even if sometimes it's hard to spot the difference.