Charlie Springer regnirps.com> wrote:

This is entirely off-topic, but....

I read that when the japanese realised they were going to be occupied,
they collected large sums of money to hire prostitutes for US troops,
hoping they could avoid mass rapes. Meanwhile the aristicratic women of
the attractive ages were assigned to higher US officers as concubines.
They had it all planned out.

Probably our occupation was not as bad as they expected. But they were
quite committed to make the best of it. So I think the success of that
occupation should be attributed more to them than to us.

It probably hurt us in iraq that we announced it as a liberation from
Saddam, and not an occupation of a hostile nation.

After the Gulf War when we bombed iraq intending to hurt them, they got
things more or less running in 6 weeks. After our invasion when we did
pinpoint bombing, we spent a year cataloging the damage and deciding
what to do before we did much reconstruction.

When the immediate hostilities were over we quickly started running
local elections to get city councils etc going. But religious parties
tended to win, so we threw out the elections and appointed expats to run
the cities. Under Bremer we were very slow to allow anything resembling
democracy.

We might have done much better if our occupation had closer resembled
the post-WWII occupation of france than the occupation of the
philippines. But it's always kind of uncertain guessing how things would
have turned out if they were different.