On JAPAN and democracy,,,, based on the emperor thing,,, we stand a better chance of democracy in IRAQ than we ever did in JAPAN. (they don’t really practice democracy today, anything this country helped set up MUST be crap)

“Thiose that can not remember the past are doomed to repeat it”
George Santayana

Except that, as Mr. Dower already pointed out, Iraq’s situation now is not like Japan’s after WWII.

No parallel can be drawn that withstands scrutiny.

The comparison is invalid. End of story.

I like the part where the professor says they are “desperate to find a historical analogy.” We are in new ground, torture, secret armies, blatant cronyism towards Halliberton and oil. And unparalleled incompetence.

Try this for historical analogy. It was 1899. McKinley was president. The U.S. was being run by imperialists. And in the process of “liberating” the Philippines from the Spanish, we proceeded to battle Filipino insurgents, most of them Muslim, for 14 years. Somewhere between 250,000 and 1 million Filipinos were killed and 4,324 American soldiers died:

Timeline of Philippine-American War

Here’s what Mark Twain had to say about it:

“There is the case of the Philippines. I have tried hard, and yet I cannot for the life of me comprehend how we got into that mess. Perhaps we could not have avoided it — perhaps it was inevitable that we should come to be fighting the natives of those islands — but I cannot understand it, and have never been able to get at the bottom of the origin of our antagonism to the natives. I thought we should act as their protector — not try to get them under our heel. We were to relieve them from Spanish tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own, and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. But now — why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater. I’m sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation.”

“He he he. I like that. Erstwhile experts. That’s two “E” words in a row. That’s cool! What’s that called again, when you do that with letters? Illiteracy?”

The Bush administration began planning for the occupation of Iraq…
Well, they haven’t really planned anything, yet.

They’ve been too busy writing Bush’s bullshit speeches for him. Why waste a lot of time and effort thinking things through? It’s so much easier to just keep lying about everything.

and he still doesn’t know!

Indeed not. Although Japan, after it was carpet-bombed and nuked just for the fun of it, got the dubious distinction of being the first post-WWII country of having class-A war criminals, ultra-nationalists and mobster glitterati installed by the occupying power as The New Liberal Hope Against Communist Takeover. The result being that it’s still like Southern Italy with ISO9000 labels.

If there’s a parallel here, it’s with the US, not Iraq.
.

Intellectually dishonest hacks: Cherry-picking their facts, misrepresenting points of view, taking quotes out of context, and denying doing any of the above.

This is the administration the trolls at ThinkProgress are swooned by.

Besides, it pisses off the sycophants who hate the Boy George of Culture Club but swoon at the feet of Boy George of Clueless Club.