"Japan in WWII was as foreign a culture as militant Islam is now, and Japan had serious guns. General MacArthur's tenure is one historical lesson we shouldn't forget."
Show me a 'japan' in the fundamentalist muslim world. -- The closest are probably Pakistan & Indonesia and they are far to capitalist/'westernized' to ever allow a serious terrorist moverment to use them, or for fundmentalsts to gain control.
Thus, they would be the only candidates that we could use your WWII methods on, AFTER we bombed them into 'unconditional surrender'. You do realize you are talking of the methods of a 'total' WWII type war, don't you?
Since the Militant Islam does not present a serious military threat in the same sense as Japan did in 1945, no total war is necessary to establish our occupational force on the ground. The analogy with Japan under MacArthur is that Japan in WWII did represent an utterly alien warrior culture and in that sense is analogous to the ancient Arab warrior culture that we are facing today.