True, but Japan and Germany show that after you defeat an enemy, if you make a serious effort to introduce new structures, they can take hold. The key is serious, and you cannot permit Islamofascism in any form any more than you could permit bush idioms or nazism.
If you do the job right there aren’t enough Islamofascists left to cause you worry for a thousand years.
Japan and Germany had established cultures, institutions, histories and governmental bodies, along with productive citizens.
They were hijacked by evil. They are examples of a defeated enemy becoming trusted allies because they could be such examples.
There is nothing like this in Iraq, Afghanistan. Those follies were never designed to succeed.
While I agree with your statement, the entire populace of Germany and Japan KNEW they had been beaten, and had undergone significant pain, and not just the military and ruling elites. I’m not sure the same is the case for Iraq and Afghanistan.
The key issues we’ve been ignoring in comparisons to both Japan and Germany are:
1. We crushed them. We didn’t tip-toe around the issue. We crushed their entire society. We made war not only upon their war machines and their military personnel, we bombed the civilian populace to a point where we were killing them by the hundreds of thousands.
When we were done with Japan and Germany, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind who won. All you had to do was stand in the middle of their countries and look around.
2. Both countries had this thing called “modern civilization” before we got there. They weren’t crapping in the middle of the street before we arrived. In Islamic countries, we’re not trying to defeat militaristic nations with otherwise functional civilizations, complete with running water and modern sanitation. Nooooo... we’re dealing with people who have the level of “civilization” from about, oh, 1300 AD.
There’s no way we’re going to jump-start 700 years of civilization in these countries. Just no way.