I say damn on the Japanese for taking away a slice of our collective humanity and forcing our hand.
Then, Pearl Harbor lead to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Now Japan no longer seeks to violently impose its will on the world.
I can only hope that 9-11 will as inevitably lead to Mecca and Medina.
And that islam learns the same ultimate lesson.
That is not quite accurate. Victor Davis Hanson deals with this very question at length in several of his books; the "Western (American) Way of War" where he repeatedly remarks on the unique phenomenon in history, where brutality was not only needed, but essential, in order to win against a barbaric, truly evil and merciless culture, and the victors, immediately afterwards, went right back to their occupations of farmer, doctor, teacher, father, without any overt evidence of the brutality they practiced just months earlier.
A unique phenomenon in all of history.
Except for those self-centered fools, traitorous fools, whose grasp of history simply emcompasses their own pathetic existence...