Empire of chickenhawks

We didn't lose a war, because we weren't actually at war with another country, and nobody won anything from us. What we failed to do is bring civilization and peace and human rights to a place that has never tolerated it. They lost.

It's sad, but some places must be the way that they are, and there's not much we can do.

Of course it was a war. Military force was necessary to keep the forces who would interfere with out program at bay. And of course we lost quite a lot, we lost a 2.3 trillion dollar investment.

That is something you research /before/ you start a war. Big bad U.S. which can't even reasonably manage itself thought it was going to remake the world in south Asia.

An opinion that echos this NYT piece from 2002, written by a liberal, which can be entered into the "stupid s*it liberals say" file:

It's rare that anyone has ever brought "human rights" to anywhere by bombing it.

Well if bombs don't work I guess we got nothin'. Like what more can ya do.

It's rare that you can "solve" social problems by military means.

And military personnel often do tend to be aware of this more acutely than their civilian leadership, who tend to live in a fantasy-land where occupiers are routinely greeted as liberators. They aren't.

Germany. Italy. Japan.

Germany, Italy and Japan were never particularly "uncivilized" historically speaking, more like they took a bit of a temporary leave-of-absence from the idea.

Near the end of the war the big Soviet boot they saw headed their way I think had a lot to do with them figuring the whole "Western civilization"-thing might have a lot to offer, after all.

Germany and Japan had as many human rights as they ever wanted. They did not welcome America as liberators, not in the slightest. The Japanese surrendered completely because the Emperor commanded them too, there was no post war resistance. But the Germans were a different story because their fuhrer had ordered them all to fight to the death. They ended up welcoming occupying American troops with sniper fire, and it was very common. Many times the Americans got fed up and called in a bombing raid or artillery barrage to raze the entire town. They didn't care who they killed, they just wanted to put them out of action. They did other stuff too like execute prisoners who were former SS and sometimes execute any German combatant who was attempting to surrender. There is film footage proving this. The occupying armies were very wary of the Germans for years after the war, they knew the hatred was still strong.

Many East Germans hated the West so much that after 30 years its leadership became "better" Soviets than the Soviets. When Gorbachev and the Politburo wanted market reform in the 1980s most Soviet client states were for it, not the leaders of East Germany though, no way.

My late father served in the tail end of WWII in Europe and was part of the occupational force of Italy through 1946. He had received a field promotion to sergeant and there was the possibility of going on to OCS after the war, but for whatever reason that didn't happen and was discharged with the rank of staff sergeant, went to college on the GI bill and returned to normal civilian life in the savings & loan business. Probably for the best as he likely would've ended up in Korea if he stayed in and the attrition rate for officers there early in the war was horrible.

Occupying Italy was a pretty easy gig as the Italians were mostly friendly, they had shot Mussolini themselves after all.

How he was treated by other Americans over the next 70 years with respect to his service depended on the American and the time in history. During the Cuban Missile Crisis it was rare that any co-workers in his bank who didn't serve were saying "thank you for your service" with 20 megatons of Soviet warheads pointed at Boston, but if they had other opinions on the outcome of the war in Europe they (mostly) tended to keep it to themselves.

It looks like Sloman's homeland has declared war on its citizens: