Japan and Germany are not calling for our destruction anymore, they are not attacking anymore, they are not using terror attacks against us, they are not hostile to us anymore. They Both accepted defeat and the terms and consequences we imposed unconditionally, they accepted occupation and our control of their countries and as time went on and we became friends we loosened our controls over them. We still have troops there and we are now allies.
If Japan and Germany acted like the Palestinians have we would not have been a quarter as restrained as Israel has.
And was it we and not they that would not settle for less than "unconditional surrender", and we and not they that used atomic weapons on an enemy suing for peace? How is that "defensive"? Unconditional surrender was a must with the aggresion and brutality of Japans actions such as in the Rape of Nanking, The Baatan Death March and countless other atrocities. Unconditional surrender means there is no question of who won and of responsibility as in WW1 which was one of the causes of Hitlers rise to power and WW2, he scapgoated Jews and others for selling Germany out in WW1. There was no doubt to the outcome but We were in total war and Japan had to be brought to its knees which means many casualties. The bomb would mean much less casualties than an invasion of Japan would, especially for us.
There were no wiser heads that had any power. Japan was not suing for peace, though there were some that wanted to Japan's to leaders refused to surrender and followed code of bushido,"the way of the warrior". Bushido was deeply inbedded in their culture and they preffered to take their own lives than surrender. A warrior who surrendered was not worthy of respect. Japanese militarism resulted in countless assasinations of anyone who tried to check the militarism or war in any way, it was an environment in which opposition to war was itself a risky endeavor
The intercepts of Japanese Imperial Army and Navy messages disclosed without exception that Japan's armed forces were determined to fight a final Armageddon battle in the homeland against an Allied invasion. The Japanese called this strategy Ketsu Go (Operation Decisive). It was founded on the premise that American morale was brittle and could be shattered by heavy losses in the initial invasion. American politicians would then gladly negotiate an end to the war far more generous than unconditional surrender
While some members of the civilian leadership did use covert diplomatic channels to attempt peace negotiation, they could not negotiate surrender or even a cease-fire. Japan, as a Constitutional Monarchy, could only legally enter into a peace agreement with the unanimous support of the Japanese cabinet, and in the summer of 1945, the Japanese Supreme War Council, consisting of representatives of the Army, the Navy and the civilian government, could not reach a consensus on how to proceed
for more
"Why Truman Dropped the Bomb
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/894mnyyl.asp?pg=2 Japan Surrenders, August 10–15, 1945. The Manhattan Project: An Interactive History. U.S. Department of Energy
http://www.cfo.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/surrender.htmThe Smithsonian and the Enola Gay
The Decision That Launched the Enola Gay
http://www.afa.org/media/enolagay/03-001.aspWe were certainly not just going about our own business when those nasty people blindsided us. That is absolutly ridiculous. Japan and Germany attacked without provocation. There was no casus belli. My god What the hell kind of history did you study
Here is some various quotes from Victor Davis Hanson. Though he is a right winger he is a very highly regarded historian.
"It was moving to commemorate the Normandy invasion on its 60th anniversary, but politely left unsaid amid the French-hosted celebrations was the real story of 1944 and 1945. We owe it to the dead, not just the living, to remember it with some integrity and honesty. Most of the Nazis' own European subjects did little to stop their mass murdering. There was no popular civilian uprising inside Germany or out. Most Germans were hostile to the onslaught of American armies in their country, preferring Hitler and the Nazis even by 1945 to so-called American liberators. When they did slur the Fuhrer it was because he brought them ruin, not the blood of millions on their hands. When they did stop fighting the Americans, it was because the thought of surrendering to the Russians was far worse. Most Frenchmen either refused to resolutely fight the Germans or passively collaborated. The idea of a broad resistance was mostly a postwar Gallic nationalist myth. Those who spearheaded a few attacks on German occupiers were more likely led by Communists than by allied sympathizers, and thus fought in hope more of an eventual Soviet victory over the Nazis than an American one."
"We can no more reason with the Islamic fascists than we could sympathize with the Nazis' demands over supposedly exploited Germans in Czechoslovakia or the problem of Tojo's Japan's not getting its timely scrap-metal shipments from Roosevelt's America. Their pouts and gripes are not intended to be adjudicated as much as to weaken the resolve of many in the United States who find the entire "war against terror" too big, or the wrong kind, of a nuisance."
"There is no legitimate complaint of the Arab world against the United States � any more than Hitler had a right to Czechoslovakia or the Japanese to Manchuria. Just because the Japanese whined that the cutting-off of U.S. petroleum forced them to bomb Pearl Harbor didn't make it true."
"Apart from the model of our forefathers who crushed and then lifted up the Germans and Japanese, we could find no better guide in this war than William Tecumseh Sherman and Abraham Lincoln � in that order. The former would remind us that our enemies traffic in pride and thus first must be disabused of it through defeat and humiliation. The latter (who turned Sherman and Grant lose) would maintain that we are a forgiving sort, who prefer restored rather than beaten people as our friends."
"Instead, the elite Westerner talks about �occupied lands� from which Israel has been attacked four times in the last 60 years � in a manner that Germans do not talk about an occupied West they coughed up to France or an occupied East annexed by Poland. Russia lectures about Jenin, but rarely its grab of Japanese islands. Turkey is worried about the West Bank, but not its swallowing much of Cyprus. China weighs in about Palestinian sovereignty but not the entire culture of Tibet; some British aristocrats bemoan Sharon�s supposed land grab, but not Gibraltar. All these foreign territories that were acquired through blood and iron and held on to by reasons of �national security� are somehow different matters when Jews are not involved."
One does not have to go back to ancient Athens � in 507 or 403 B.C. � to grasp the depressing fact that most authoritarians do not surrender power voluntarily. There would be no democracy today in Japan, South Korea, Italy, or Germany without the Americans' defeat of fascists and Communists. Democracies in France and most of Western Europe were born from Anglo-American liberation; European resistance to German occupation was an utter failure. Panama, Granada, Serbia, and Afghanistan would have had no chance of a future without the intervention of American troops. All of Eastern Europe is free today only because of American deterrence and decades of military opposition to Communism. Very rarely in the modern age do democratic reforms emerge spontaneously and indigenously (ask the North Koreans, Cubans, or North Vietnamese). Tragically, positive change almost always appears after a war in which authoritarians lose or are discredited (Argentina or Greece), bow to economic or cultural coercion (South Africa), or are forced to hold elections (Nicaragua)."
"The Palestinians will, in fact, get their de facto state, though one that may be now cut off entirely from Israeli commerce and cultural intercourse. This is an apparently terrifying thought: Palestinian men can no longer blow up Jews on Monday, seek dialysis from them on Tuesday, get an Israeli paycheck on Wednesday, demonstrate to CNN cameras about the injustice of it all on Thursday � and then go back to tunneling under Gaza and three-hour, all-male, conspiracy-mongering sessions in coffee-houses on Friday. Beware of getting what you bomb for."
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