The differences between the US occupation of Japan and Iraq are suggestive. The US fought Japan in exhausting war and had every reason to hate its government. Democratic America detested Japanese monarchy. The Western Christians were xenophobic about very strange customs of the Japanese. Yet the US was wise to change none of that.
America strengthened the very Japanese institutions that underpinned the war, and only eliminated Japanese army, the direct threat. Then the US used those institutions to change the Japanese outlook from within. The mid-term result was hugely successful: Japanese ambitions were channeled in the economy, and the economy directed outward. The long-term change in mentality is unlikely, and Japanese imperialism would re-surface, reinforced by economic successes. Hardly any policy, however, could provide more than mid-term results.
Contrast the American policy in Iraq. The US destroyed the institutions such as the strong government and police which cemented the multi-ethnic religiously diverse Iraq. Reforming a failed state is impossible; only strong states survive the reforms. America made the situation still worse by directly enforcing the law and pushing for the unwelcome political changes like democracy and Westernization. No people would accept new ideology force-fed to them by hostile outsider. They will fight or, at best, remain contemptuously passive. Once the occupation force withdraws, locals will run for the golden old values in their most extreme form. Population will firmly connect the resistance fighters with idealized old values, and elect them to power.
America could follow the Japan example in nuclear Egypt, Iran, and North Korea. All of them still have strong security apparatus and reasonably conformant population. America may concur their capitals, install acceptable rulers without damaging the security framework of the countries, and have the new rulers brainwash their citizens with local variety of the Western ideology, from schools to mass media. Ataturk was almost alone when he started secularizing Turkey. Totalitarian governments plus the Western ideology could solve the problem of nuclear rogue states.
So what we need is MORE and BETTER neoconservative meddling? Well, it's an idea.
That's quite the first post there.
Ok, let me drop 2 nukes on Iraq, and carpet bomb any semblance of industry they have away and then well talk about following Japans example, *******.
And your trying to tell me we didnt change Japanese law? Sorry buddy, last time I checked MacArthur re-wrote their constitution after the war. Also, seeing as I have spent more than a few months in Japan, I can tell you first hand that Japan has become very westernized. Weve been "force feeding" japan for the last 60 years.
The problem in Iraq is the politicians never really let the professionals run the whole show. Everything is so touchy, everything has to be so politically correct, they forget to realize that war is just about as far from political correctness as you can get. Its not even really a war in terms of what were trained for, its a prolonged security and stability operation.
We are so restricted its rediculous, every time you discharge your weapon on a patrol, you have to file a report, every time you point a weapon at someone, you file a report. If you yell at an Iraq for being an idiot... you file a report. This is not the type of war we should be fighting, this is the type of war the terrorists want us to fight, because they know the American public will not support a prolonged conflict of any kind for long, and the ****ing politicians are going right along with it.
We should have, and still have the ability to do it right. Im not saying it would be a pretty sight (honestly civilians lack the ability to accuratly comprehend war), yet itll all get shown on TV like some kind of reality show, and people will be outraged, confused and upset, because theyre not equiped to handle it, **** half the Marines I know arent really equipped to handle the metal ramifications of it on their own, but they survive it because the institution we are a part of makes it possible. Civilians dont have that.
Call me what you will, but the armed forces exists to terminate the enemy. As an Infantrymen in the Marine Corps we are taught from day one, verbatum, "The mission of the Marine Corps Rifle squad is to locate, close with, and destroy the enemy by fire and manuver, and to repel the enemys assults by fire and close combat".... nowhere in that phrase do I see "Our mission is to look around for bad guys, catch them, detain them, let them go because of lack of tangible evidence.... then file a report."
The US has recently [url=http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8454152]published a field manual on counterinsurgency[/url] that makes for interesting reading. It sounds quite a lot like the general jist of historical Australian tactics from the Boer War, the World Wars and the Malayan Emergency through to Vietnam and the current Iraq War. My guess is our smaller military and resources demands greater versatility and efficiency from the troops, but I can't back that up.
The contrast between American and Australian (and New Zealand) tactics in Vietnam, I think, is particularly relevant. ANZAC forces used small-scale patrols, stuck to jungle rather than using paths and trails, moved on foot, carried a lot of extra water and stuff, used less ammo, used more cautious tactics and avoided the very destructive large-scale search and destroy missions of the American forces (aside from the Green Berets who operated in the mountains) in favour of less destructive guerilla operations. In short, they didn't rely on overwhelming firepower. The main criticism of how they operated was that these guerilla maneouvering were too detailed and small-scale, that the body-count wasn't high enough, and that they didn't have enough troops to both defend the populace and fight the enemy at the same time. Regardless though, I think what the new manual is recommending sounds quite similar to Aussie counter-insurgency tactics.
(I'm pulling all this from a book on the History of Australia in Vietnam that I once read.)
There's a lot of anecdotal stuff from Brits and Australians too, criticising the US approach to counter-insurgency and its rules of engagement. The Brits, of course, have a long history of urban warfare and counterinsurgency type deals, too. (remember the Malayan Emergency, also western forces fighting commies in the jungle, was a success). [url=http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/be-a-bloke-the-other-war-for-women-soldiers/2006/12/17/1166290412414.html?page=3]This recent anecdote[/url] struck me as interesting and illustrative, too:
[quote]When it came to building a thinking military, however, Australia was ahead of its allies. Ms Harris relayed an anecdote told to her, Mr Podger, and the third investigator, the retired major-general Roger Powell.
A group of Australians were standing guard in Baghdad when a group of children began letting off firecrackers nearby. One of the Australian soldiers, who spoke Arabic, "instinctively knew" the explosions were merely firecrackers, not something worse, and went over to the children. "Listen guys," the soldier said in Arabic. "This is dead dangerous, run off now."
Some American soldiers looking on recognised they would not have reacted in the same way and "were very admiring of how the Australians did that". They have now approached the Australian army to find out why its soldiers are "so much more attuned to what's happening" in Iraq.
I'm not convinced that "more firepower" is the answer any more than it was in Vietnam... Christ, in Vietnam they dropped twice as much ordinance as in all theatres of WW2 combined and tried just about everything short of nuclear weapons, but they still lost because they lost all political and popular support among the people. Iraq's probably beyond salvagable now, but if these ideas had been followed four years ago, who knows what might have happened? Any any rate, maybe the lessons can be learned for the next war (hopefully one of more modest scale and ambition).
Of course, Spec's right, the Marines probably aren't the best troops to be using in these situations. They ain't trained for it. They're designed and trained for the swift and deadly application of force by the world's most lethal conventional military, they're elite combat soldiers, not for "armed social work",
I have a problem--just as anybody with a "soul" on this planet should--with War, and killing in general, but, ****, all you people who are still talking about it are doing nothing more than beating a dead hose. We've heard it all before, we've read it all before, we can't turn on the ****ing news without hearing about how things are going, so shut the hell up about and let me watch my cartoons. I don't understand why you just can't accept the fact that there is a war going on, that it has been going on for five years, and will probably go on for about two more, at the least.
As Americans, we are constantly spoon-fed how upsetting the world is, with the scares of the flu pandemic, the on-going war, terror alerts, and a general lack of fee-free porn sitse, it becomes in our nature to discuss it. I can't fault people for wanting to open lines of communication and attempt to further their social lives. But, please, for your own health and the love of your fellow man, try to at least better yourself and this world by finally breaking from this pattern of depressoin, take some initiative and talk about something that doesn't involve the mindless and pointless slaughter of innocent people.
Now, with that out of the way, I must take part in hypocrisy.
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[quote=OSfollower;504167]...I decided I didn't want your text ruining my post, so I just have this quote here. My posts are more important to me than all but a few things on VGC.
You cannot look at these two situations and properly compare them for many reasons. Reason one is the fact that Japan agreed to the Potsdam Declaration, the declaration then-Emperor Showa signed as surrender in 1945. Reason two is that Iraq is a fairly isolated incident, whereas World War II was, well, ****ING WORLD WAR II. Reason three, as Specopps put it (slightly less articulately), nuclear weapons were involved, weapons that killed an estimated 215,000 people as of December 1945, not to mention the Battle of Okinawa which had an estimated 225,000 civilian and soldier deaths, and, hell, the firebombing of Tokyo ALONE had an estimated death count more than the entire War in Iraq, including those lost at 9/11. Lastly, and what I would feel is most important, is that Saddam was, for all intensive purposes, an a[COLOR=white]ss[/COLOR]hole who only wanted to be in power, a man who, unlike then-Emperor Showa, didn't care about the death of the people he had ruled.