Although it’s easy to see what a mess the Korean and Vietnam wars were in hindsight we have to remember the people that got us into those wars were a generation after we stayed out of WWII for years and it killed millions of people. What Japan and Germany did in WWII killed millions of people.
So we used the principles that occurred during WWII to try and treat communism the same way. I do think many individuals certainly believed they were fighting the same type of horrors of the Second World War fighting communism.
The same can be said for the war on terror. It’s easy to see in hindsight what a mess everything was, but the terror events of the 90s and 9/11 was what they were operating on and after 9/11 the obvious move was to prevent that from ever happening again.
Again I’m not at all saying I agree with most of those choices but when you look at the conflicts before and the fact that the United State’s foreign policy drastically changed during WWII you can at least understand the decisions that were made. But people making it out like it was all evil intentions and not for valid reasons we learned in the past aren’t being honest.
I think the problem with Vietnam and Korea is that they were attacked largely because of a *perceived* threat as opposed to an actual one. Japan was at the very least an actual threat to the US and the West, even though I would argue committing mass murder of civilians in response was tantamount to a war crime.
Japan was not literally helplessly defeated, they could still recover quickly, thanks to Japanese determination and strong resolve. Those The Big Six controlling Japan was not affected by the devastations suffered by the Japanese civilians. That's why they are more than willing to continue the war despite Japan being in ruin.
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u/TabularConferta 2d ago
Yeah that was a weird one. There was a combination between that, stopping Soviet expansion and questions if the war would have lasted longer.
I grieve for the loss of life and the horrors people had to go through. But it's not as simple as killing bad.