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.
Japan was hardly a “modern civilized” nation in 1941. They had been modern for all of 40 years; still had feudal agriculture, autocratic government heavily controlled by the Army and Navy, and worshipped a man as a god. No, I don’t see a great deal of difference between Japan and, say, Iran.