— As many others have noted, USS Clueless goes into an extended historical narrative about Japan, and then draws the following conclusion about Islam
…before this war ends we shall have to make changes as radical to the majority of Islamic nations, especially the Arab ones. I fear that, because I don’t see how this war can end if we don’t, unless we are defeated. We can’t merely defeat them militarily; I think we have to break their spirit.
I think the parallel to breaking the spirit of the Japanese must have been Hiroshima, but the Japan part sort of made my eyes glaze over (I studied East Asian history in college, so I already knew about the fits-and-starts flirtation with modernity the Japanese went through.) There are many ways in which Japan differs significantly from Islam: Japan’s an island-nation historically isolated from the rest of the world, with a uniform racial composition and social structure, while Islam is a religion practiced by over a billion people in dozens of countries around the world, with varying degrees of accomodation to non-Islamic elements. So right out of the chute, the parallels aren’t really striking.
That being said, the task at hand in the Terror War has to focus in the Arab Islamists who refuse to accomodate the modern world, and the ultimate solution, in my humble opinion, is to replace their theocracies with secular governments on the mold of Turkey. This doesn’t mean “breaking their spirit” as much as it means liberating it from the yoke of ignorance and backwardness. Mohammed, bless his little heart, was a reformer who dragged the Arabs kicking and screaming into the seventh century. In the spirit of Mohammed, it would be nice if another reformer emerged in the Arab World to take them on into the twenty-first. This will probably take another hundred years or so.