To truly defeat an opponent you need to wage total war.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dresden were important. Free-speech bans. Completely exhausting the citizenry and utterly demolishing their civilian and military infrastructure.
You look at all the half-hearted conflicts since then, and you realize that this is completely contrary to international law at the present. In Iraq, Anbar should have been flattened. Instead of "a million killed" according to statistical analyses that were a bit furry to begin with but also included "those never conceived that would have been according to population projections a decade old" should have been "a million Sunnis killed with little mercy, and then totalitarian measures afterwards to eradicate bad thinking from mosques, schools, and tribes, with the leaders of many of those tribes and many imams hanged." Public humiliation with full condemnation from Muslim states from Indonesia to Morocco, along with the grand mufti of Mecca and al-Azhar.
Instead we got "minds and hearts" (HAM) being won. Oddly, it wasn't primary the arch-conservatives agitating for what now, when it's convenient, seems like the One True Progressive means.
At the same time it must be noted that Japan was also allowed to save face while the burden of shame was shifted to others. It was occupied, but that didn't go badly. Those working with Japan had some sense of the culture, unlike most of those working with the South to this day who can only see things in the most narrow ethnocentric view.
Hitler offed himself. The fiction was allowed to exist that the German populace was good and it was really what did amount to not so much a change in culture but a change in a particular political philosophy that resulted from fairly specific conditions. The loss of territory suffered by Germany, with 100 miles or so lost off their eastern border, the loss and ethnic cleansing of Koenigsberg, and the ethnic cleansing of the Sudentenland played a role--massive dislocations of the populace. The Soviet zones were stripped: Not only were German concentration camps preserved for a while, but nearly any kind of booty was removed to the USSR. In the Western zones massive aid was given for reconstruction--not a paltry amount, but enough to rebuild the economy. It was obvious that the US and Britain were not the enemy. In the Western zones it also helped that Berlin was kept free, that the US and Britain were willing to (as people would cowardly put it today) risking WWIII by daring to challenge the USSR and provide food to the West Berliners. Not only did we defeat them, then we turned around and helped them after the fact financially, materially, and in terms of freedoms that they did like (knowing that under the USSR it would be worse.) Having a common foe helped.
That won HAM in a meaningful way. It looked at culture, it looked at solidarity and group boundaries. The Germans were defeated but allowed to save face, just as the Japanese.
And, of course, the temporary revocation of civil liberties helped a lot, and were as brief as possible (not the jackbooted "progressive" thinking faux progressives with the hot-headed thinking tout now). Occupation, speech and assembly bans existed, but not for decades. Still you get the swastika popping up, but even to this day that kind of speech is illegal and made so by German, not Allied, political will. That resulted from the appropriate winning of HAM.
The same kind of process was at work in Japan.
In the South, there was a large dollop of total war. Much of the infrastructure was destroyed. Massive loss of men. But the culture wasn't something that was billed as a temporary aberration, it was something deeply rooted in their cultural and economic system. Reconstruction was paltry and the South continued to be poor. While Lincoln was all about HAM, most others were about gain. Some went in to just help former slaves. Others went in to exploit. With the demolition of the economy, the South became poorer. Little was offered to help, and there was no sense of solidarity with the North. The North for the most part continued to be antagonistic, and while the North was all about ending slavery if you look at the history of discrimination and racism in the North, it wasn't all that much better in many places than in the South. Rather like having the US go into Germany and demolish things, only to have the US institute laws banning Jews from power, stipulating where the Roma could live, and displaying pictures of Hitler from time to time while kicking Germans in the teeth and making sure the Jews and Roma there got special treatment--only to be abandoned in short order. Condescension and hypocrisy, along with impoverishment. Unlike the respect we showed the Germans in many ways, and the Marshall Plan.
The way of dealing with the South wasn't culturally appropriate--there were and still are differences between some cultural traits held by long-time Southerners and their descendents. I personally think that these cultural traits are evil; I've used the word before in this regard and stick with it. It sows division, strife, and has led not only to increased rates of violence and racism in the South but throughout much of the country. And, the way it's led people to think, it's also created some problems internationally by reinforcing the kind of tribal thought that already pervaded much of the world.
Being superficial doesn't make you super. A lot went on that isn't obvious and which many don't want to remember because it's inconvenient. They have what some here have called "good hate." I view it as just hate, with the stress on "hate" and not "just."
Going back to Iraq, Iraq was more like the South. Total war there would have resulted in a mess. Things would probably have calmed down, but the sense of humiliation and grievance would have festered because nobody would even think these days of altering a cultural trait. We're talking Hatfields and McCoys here, and those kinds of things take a change in thinking, not a "aw, we like you and appreciate you" struggle for HAM. The issues are of long standing. You'd need to produce not tactical solidarity to fight a temporary common enemy but strategic solidarity and the mood in the US among (R) was just to have a short-term victory and exit; the mood among (D) in the US was "if it's a mess, we can blame Bush, we don't want to invest there and we certainly don't want to change the culture, that's assimilationist."
There's a good reason for a lot of population patterns we have. Genocide was, for many thousands of years, the norm. It's the logical outcome of communalism: We're proud as a people, you're guilty as a people. At some point, you're so guilty as a people that we have to invoke the death penalty and you, as a people, must die. That can involve slaughter, it can involve assimilation.
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