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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (106185)	7/18/2003 1:16:05 AM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

<The Japanese weren't conquered.> The main Japanese army was on the mainland, cut off by our blockade, from returning home. The Soviets had just invaded Manchuria, anyway. Japan has no oil, no iron, none of a long list of essential raw materials needed for making war machines. We'd sunk all their ships, shot down all their planes, and they had no prospect of making any more. The blockade was steadily reducing the population to starvation, since their cold, rocky islands depended on imported food. We had been fire-bombing their cities, reducing them, together with all the inhabitants, to ashes. 3 million Japanese had been killed. And then we started dropping nuclear weapons on them. This doesn't meet your definition of "conquered"? The Iraqis would be a lot more submissive, if we had done to Basra what we did to Dresden, and done to Tikrit what we did to Nagasaki. That would have been "shock and awe". <But there were NEVER 1.25 million US troops occupying Germany for 50 years.> I said that is what it would take to garrison Iraq; a rough guess, 5% of Iraq's population. I said Germany and Japan are wholly different cases from Iraq and Afghanistan, a false analogy. Clearly, 150,000 isn't doing the job in Iraq, and 11,000 isn't doing the job in Afghanistan.