The lesson from Japan and Nazi Germany is that you CAN change a culture, but first you have to thoroughly break it.
In Japan, we made their god come down from heaven and surrender to us, burned all of their cities to ashes, and made every mother worry first and foremost where the next mouth of food was coming from for her children.
Had we done the same in Iraq, we might have succeeded. But we no longer have the stomach for war.
“The lesson from Japan and Nazi Germany is that you CAN change a culture, but first you have to thoroughly break it.”
Yeah, well you’ve learned the wrong ‘lesson’ if you think that’s what happened.
Nazism was not a “culture”. It was a political movement imposed upon Germany. Germany’s culture was western and Christian and it has a very close connection to Great Britain and to America where Germans were the largest ethnic group after the British isles. It just needed to have the criminal Nazi regime removed.
Japan’s culture was already open to Western ideas. Japan had been experimenting with a parliament since 1889. Once Japan was opened in the 1860s they enthusiastically began trying to adopt western ideas to their culture. Their Meiji Constitution of 1890 was modeled on the Prussian constitution.
But the Emperor worship did have to go. It was a source of trouble because it fed into Japanese militarism mixed with ideas of racial superiority. It required the complete defeat of WWII to strip that from them.
But Emperor worship was and is vastly different from Islam. There was no outside reservoir of Hirohito worshippers outside of Japan. That “religion” was entirely limited to Japan and by making Hirohito publicly admit that was not a god we were able to bring it to an end.
Iraq is entirely different. It is an Islamic culture over a thousand years old. There is no Emperor to defeat and to have capitulate, Mohammed and Allah will always be lurking in the background. Islam has no affinity with the Christian west and in fact is its historic enemy. And unlike Japan, Iraq wasn’t flirting with western style democracy for 50 years before our invasion.
A western country can rule over an Islamic land, as the British and French had done many times before. But they didn’t make a dent in the underlying culture because it is based on Islam. And the Iraqis aren’t going to give up their Islamic culture.
This wasn’t a matter of “having no stomach for war”. Saddam’s military was utterly defeated by us. We occupied the country. We could occupy Iraq for as long as we want, but whenever we left the underlying culture would reassert itself which is what it’s doing now.
The only group over there that offers any optimism are the Kurds, who are showing signs of creating a home grown democracy. But unfortunately the Kurds don’t have their own country.