Jonah Thomas wrote:
> Charlie Springer
regnirps.com> wrote:>> Brad Eckert wrote
>>
>>> Occupation is
>>> fake justice at best. I think the first step to having peace in the
>>> middle eastern countries would be to stop screwing them over.
>> Now I know why Japan is such a mess. Feudal Japan was a kinder gentler
>> place. Well, at least a better place to make movies about.
>
> 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.
I had not heard that story, but it fits with what I know.
>
> Probably our occupation was not as bad as they expected.
Indeed: they expected an extremely harsh occupation. My best friend in
Japan is the son of an Imperial Navy officer. He has told me that his
father expected the occupation authorities to round up army and navy
officers, along with their families, and put them all to death.
> 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.
One thing that helped, I think, was that in both Japan and Germany we
designated a few high ranking scapegoats and hanged them, but we also
left the civilian power structure largely intact. Patton took a lot of
abuse in the press for his honest explanation of this.
In Japan, the emperor was very helpful, and essentially volunteered for
the job of assisting the occupation with his call for surrender. We were
very wise to accept this offer. Many have made the case that he had
plenty of blood on his hands: a hanging could certainly have been justified.
>
> It probably hurt us in iraq that we announced it as a liberation from
> Saddam, and not an occupation of a hostile nation.
Many analysts believe that one of the mistakes in Iraq was to throw
every member of the Baath Party out of power. You have to keep the
clerks and the technocrats at their posts, otherwise chaos ensues.
>
> 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.
--
John Doty, Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
--
The axiomatic method of mathematics is one of the great achievements of
our culture. However, it is only a method. Whereas the facts of
mathematics once discovered will never change, the method by which these
facts are verified has changed many times in the past, and it would be
foolhardy to expect that changes will not occur again at some future
date. - Gian-Carlo Rota
