I get flack for it sometimes here but i agree. Iraq was a foil for Iran and a two bit dictatorship.
I wonder if Japan, without he nukes, would have been another Vietnam.
I know North Korea WITH the nukes would have been another Japan. hmm.
I could be wrong.
Like you said, Japan flirted with western style government. Good grief, didn’t McArthur want to drop like 17 nukes along China border?
I don’t know the number of bombs but MacArthur wanted to drop nukes on the Chinese when they joined the fight on the side of the NORKs. The public fight over this proposal led to Truman firing MacArthur.
“I wonder if Japan, without he nukes, would have been another Vietnam.”
A conventional invasion of Japan would have been far, far worse. Vietnam was 50,000 casualties. Estimates for Operation Olympic ran from 1 to 4 million .
From Wiki
MacArthur did not advocate the use of nuclear weapons to recover the situation.[81][82] In his testimony before the Senate Inquiry, he said that he had never recommended their use.[83] In 1960, MacArthur challenged a statement by Truman that he had wanted to use nuclear weapons, and Truman issued a retraction, stating that he had no documentary evidence of this claim; it was merely his personal opinion. According to Major General Courtney Whitney, MacArthur did at one point consider a plan to use radioactive wastes to seal off North Korea, based upon a 1950 proposal by Louis Johnson, but never submitted this to the Joint Chiefs.[81] In 1985 Richard Nixon recalled discussing the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with MacArthur:
MacArthur once spoke to me very eloquently about it, pacing the floor of his apartment in the Waldorf. He thought it a tragedy the bomb was ever exploded. MacArthur believed that the same restrictions ought to apply to atomic weapons as to conventional weapons, that the military objective should always be limited damage to noncombatants... MacArthur, you see, was a soldier. He believed in using force only against military targets, and that is why the nuclear thing turned him off, which I think speaks well of him.