From one of those Blogs -
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The Japanese wised up - let's hope the fedayeen don't
There is a similarity between the banzai charges of Japanese troops against US Marines and soldiers in World War II and the attacks of the Iraqi fedayeen the past week against American Marines and tanks. Both rely on spiritual power to prevail.
Until the last year of the war, senior Japanese commanders insisted that the superior spiritual power of Japanese troops could and would overcome American firepower. They understood quite well that they, the Japanese, suffered from a serious deficiency of weapons power, compared to the Americans. The Japanese soldier was equipped with a .25-caliber, bolt-action rifle. It had a shorter range and less stopping power than the basic rifle of American troops, the M1 Garand, a semiautomatic rifle firing the drop-'em-dead .30-06 cartridge. Japanese hand grenades were less powerful than the Americans'. The Japanese army simply did not do close-air support at all, and what attacks their aircraft made upon American shipping and forces were rarely coordinated with Japanese ground forces. The American air forces pretty much swept the Japanese from the skies by mid-1944, perhaps even a little earlier. So Japanese troops suffered terribly from well-coordinated and conducted close-air support, unopposed by Japanese air power.
Finally, Japan's senior generals wised up and figured out that mere moral courage and superior spiritual power (meaning for them the superiority of Japanese culture) were not going to win the day. Just before the battle of Iwo Jima, Gen. Kuribayashi expressly forbade banzai charges and actually ordered that no Japanese soldier was to die before he had killed either 10 Americans or one tank. He drilled and emphasized fire discipline, self-restraint and command and control at all levels. The result: Iwo Jima's defenders inflicted upon the US Marines one-fourth of all the casualties the Marines suffered in the entire war: 25,000 total, including 5,000 dead. One battle.
Okinawa's defense was similarly disciplined. The American Marines and soldiers paid dearly for every yard they advanced once they reached the line where the Japanese chose to defend from. Japanese air attacks, including kamikaze attacks, against the allied fleet were so relentless that the US Navy suffered more killed and wounded during the battle than either the Army or Marines. More than 72,000 Americans fell during the campaign from all causes.
Lee Harris wrote of the fantasy ideology of Islamists. Briefly, al Qaeda and their religious allies have not a real strategy for fighting America, they have spasms. Their attacks are not well integrated assaults meant to hit us where we are weakest, but highly symbolic gestures meant to reinforce the Islamists' own convictions of moral and spiritual superiority. They demonstrate, at least to themselves and their comrades, not that the US can be defeated, but that it can be hurt. Victory, if it comes, belongs to Allah anyway, and the eagerness with which so many Islamists embrace death is meant to prove their devotion to Allah, not their military prowess.
Hence we see fedayeen attacking Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles with rifles, riding in the back of pickup trucks. They are not truly hoping to destroy the tanks. They are proving to each other and Allah their moral and religious purity. In this regard they are similar to banzai-charging Japanese, though in an important respect very different: the Japanese really did have coherent military objectives and thought they could gain them, even though they mistakenly thought their perceived innate superiority would gain them. From all accounts, though, the fedayeen have no well-conceived objectives; they have only a belief in their spiritual purity.
The Japanese soldier was impelled by a religious faith, too: extreme devotion to the emperor. But there was no promise of reward in the afterlife to the Japanese. In Eastern religions generally, life after death is not envisioned as in either Christianity or Islam, both of which teach the prosperity of the individual's soul. Life after death in both those faiths is life after death as you, as me. But not in WW 2 Japanese bushido militarism. Life after death was thought of as existence of one's spirit in a great chain of ancestor spiritism. Heroic death was intended to honor not oneself, as it does for Islamists, but the emperor first of all, and one's family after that. The reward of such a death to a Japanese soldier was that one's ancestors would not be shamed, and that future generations would ritually honor him along with all the other ancestors. But the honoring was collective, not individual.
So when national disaster threatened Japan, they were able to shed the idea of cultural superiority as a battle tool. They still believed it, they ceased to rely on it in battle. A soldier could join the ranks of honored ancestors just as easily under the new rules as the old.
The Islamists have a different hurdle to overcome: for them two things combine to create a powerful disincentive to change tactics. First, they have a powerful notion of eternal, personal reward in heaven. Second, this reward is highly dependent upon the manner of their deaths. Dying as a jihadist martyr against infidels in Islam guarantees immediate admission into heaven, that's in the Quran. But to cast aside all care for one's earthly life, relying on on the spiritual power that Allah grants even it it bring death to the body - that guarantees the pinnacle of eternal bliss.
Of course, not everyone fighting against allied forces in Iraq are such fantasy ideologists. The regular Iraqi army and the Republican Guard seem not to be throwing their lives away for religious reasons. (Their tactical competence is poor, but that's not a religious matter.)
But the fedayeen keep doing the same dumb things over and over. Why don't they seem to learn from their mistakes? Perhaps because they don't see them as mistakes. The point is to die carrying the fight to the infidel enemy, no matter how ineffective the fight may be. We are not the point to the fedayeen except as the convenient infidels who help guarantee their admission to heaven.
The Japanese wised up. Let's hope the fedayeen never do."
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