The Japanese (civilians and military) were in the thrall of a wacky fake-religion suicidal death cult. We had to nuke them twice to snap them out of it.
But the Japanese had centuries of high culture to look back to for inspiration. And they weren’t into marrying their cousins.
Anyway, Diana West has two good posts:
We fight a very strange and endless kind of war — a war that may best be understood not as George W. Bush’s idiotically non-named “war on terror,” or Obama’s even more postmodernist “man-caused disaster,” but this: the War on Muslim Alienation. Assuaging Islam is the cause we have undertaken since 9/12 in order to protect ourselves, somewhat, without “alienating” the very politico-religious culture that plans our destruction.
Had lunch with a Marine officer who has served three tours in Iraq. He remains extremely disturbed about the ROE (rules of engagement), which he said grew increasingly constricting. He talked, for example, about the insanity of repeatedly arresting and releasing (and arresting and releasing again) enemy fighters, and noted “you can’t shoot someone setting an IED….”
