The Other Real Lessons of World War Two

The President delivered a strong speech yesterday to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention. His main point that winning the war against Islamic radicalism is essential to America and to free societies everywhere. Here he is spot on.

However, the thing that is getting all the attention is that the President made several comparisons to World War Two and Vietnam. It is true that we can and should draw important lessons from these experiences. But, we need to dig a bit deeper, look through these imperfect analogies and be able to talk about politically incorrect things in order to draw other, perhaps more relevant lessons.


Lesson One - Japan was defeated completely and unconditionally before any ‘reforms’ were capable of being accepted by the Japanese population.

In this struggle with radical Islam, we are fighting against a much larger, more dispersed, ambiguous enemy. Iraq and Afghanistan are but two fronts in a much larger struggle.

The Islamists have not been defeated completely and unconditionally. Finally, under Gen Petraeus, we are fighting a more aggressive battle that is taking the fight to the enemy. However, let’s set proper expectations, despite the surge, we are still fighting a politically correct war in which we are afraid to inflict or take casualties. Jack Jacobs, adjunct prof at USMA and CMH recipient, often makes the point that the surefire way to take the most casualties in the long run and not win the war is to fight without being willing to take or inflict casualties. Maybe we have no choice, but if so, then we should manage our expectations for results.


Lesson Two - Japan's aggression was not religiously based. A friend put it nicely, "Japan's aggression was driven by a sense of their own manifest destiny (Greater East Asia Co-Properity Sphere), but they did not have a religious basis for it. Nor did their religion, per se, have a construct of 'Convert Or Die'. Their goal was not to win converts to Shinto-ism, it was to create Japan as a world power. It was not religiously fueled expansionism."

There are many analogies that can be drawn between Shinto-ism and Islam. It is true that they both perceived themselves to be superior to others and that they viewed others as inferior, sometimes less than human. However, the Japanese experience is dramatically different from the Islamic experience and the Shinto religion in pre-war Japan is very different from Islam. (I am not making light of Japanese atrocities during this period in history. The killing in Nanking and elsewhere are great examples of the compassionless brutality of war-time Japan. These experiences are among the darkest chapters in human history, along with the holocaust, the killing fields and others.) All I am saying is that we can draw direct lessons for the current situation by saying that, “as a result of the war, the Japanese looked at their religion differently or became more tolerant people, and that the same thing will happen with Islam”. A monotheistic Islam is very different than the “religious” adoration that the Japanese had for the emperor.


Lesson Three - Radical Islam is different. Despite countless attempts (some peaceful and some terribly violent)over nearly 1,500 years, to the best of my knowledge, there has not been a population of Moslems that have converted from Islam to another religion. If I am wrong, please let me know. Most every college and university in the Middle East over the last 200 years was founded and run by Christian missionaries. At first the missionaries tried to proseltyze and convert the Moslems. Then, after years of failure, they changed strategies and thought that if they teach modern things (science, medicine, law, engineering, agriculture, literature, etc.) that the population would gradually accept their presence and that some ‘enlightened’ people would convert to Christianity…none did. (Please see "Power, Faith and Fantasy" by Michael Oren)

Before the war, Japan had a small, but not inconsequential, Christian population. These were people who had responded to the missionaries' work. At that time, Japan was also a society struggling to find balance between tradition and modernity. Logic would tell us that in today's Islamic world, there would be also be some similarly measurable parts of the population that was responsive to the missionaries. But there really is not and never has been. Why?

Maybe there are enough characteristics of Islamic societies that make them different. While I am not an expert, I do not think that Shinto-ism had the same zeal for conquest as Islam and did not invoke an “afterlife” as a principal motivating force driven by commandments from G-d that have been unwavering for centuries.


Lesson Four - Politically Correctness will lead to failure. We will never make the type of progress that we are hoping for until we are able to talk openly about the role of Islam in the current struggle. We need to shine the light of day on tenets of Islam that are incompatible with modern life such as its treatment of women and people of other religious persuations. We will only be able to devise a strategy if we can talk about things. Said the other way, it is impossible to devise a winning strategy without being able even to identify aloud an important root cause of much of the problem.

The President’s analogy is perhaps closest in saying that if we leave, things will go from bad to much worse for the civilian population in Iraq. That is probably true. I do not know anyone who thinks that things will somehow miraculously get better if we were to withdraw. Doing so is naive and just plain stupid. Maybe this is reason enough to stay and then hope that somehow their society will not always be on the brink of disintegrating into nothingness.

Ultimately, it will be the Moslems themselves who have to fight to win this war and propel their faith and way of life from the dark ages to the 21st century. As long as they’re not doing it openly in large numbers, we will not achieve the kind of future that the President is talking about. “Democracy” alone will not be sufficient. The vision of an Iraq (or any other Islamic country) emerging as a peaceful, tolerant, society where women are equal members of the community, where ethnic and religious minorities are able to practice their faiths peacefully without discrimination, is a fantasy. The example of Japan has too many holes to be more than a soundbite.