The Japanese working class had the right to resist the US occupation of Japan, and they ought to have exercised it. Failure to resist it resulted in a one-party state and permanent US military presence in Japan. The Japanese Communist Party's decision to take the parliamentary road and continue it even after the banning of the February 1, 1947 general strike proved to be fatal to its political fortune, and, by the time when the party turned left upon the beginning of the Korean War, it was too late to prepare to fight the Red Purge. The Iraqi Communist Party has made the same mistake, except that Iraqi Communists will pay a far higher price for it than Japanese Communists ever have.
The US power elite have already decided to apply a tactic they used in the US occupation of Japan to Iraq -- rehabilitation of the old guard: "[T]he U.S. de-purged 32,000 ultra-rightists, many of whom joined the new military's officer corps. In fact, half of the 400,000 who volunteered for the new army and 800 of the hired officer corps had served in Tojo's military. . . . In 1970, 80 percent of the top officers in the Japanese army were from the old imperial army" (endnotes omitted, Ashley Smith, "The Occupation of Japan," International Socialist Review 29, May-June 2003, <http://www.isreview.org/issues/29/japan_occupation.shtml>). The best bet for Washington would be to expand the program of building death squads out of "veterans of [Saddam] Hussein's special forces and the Republican Guard" that Peter Maass ably described ("The Way of the Commandos," <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/magazine/01ARMY.html">1 May 2005</a>).
>[lbo-talk] Coming Around to His Father's Thinking (A new turn in US
>military strategy in Iraq?)
>Chris Doss lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com
>Fri May 27 15:11:25 PDT 2005
<snip>
>--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
>>A small part of Christian Parenti's "reluctance" is probably rooted
>>in his apparent belief that Washington could and should have
>>reconstructed Iraq:
>
>Why couldn't or shouldn't it have? It very likely could and
>certainly should. Reconstructing and developing conquered
>territories is part of what empire building is all about (c.f. the
>Roman Empire, British Empire, Russian Empire, Soviet Union).
>Successful empire-building requires intelligent management of
>conquered regions and winning of at least partial support by the
>local population. Otherwise it just doesn't work.
The US power elite, unlike men who presided over the creation of the British Empire, have never been interested in developing settler colonies (of which North America was once a shining example), so there would be no American settler in Iraq who would bring capital to Iraq with him. More importantly, at this point in history, the US needs to import capital, rather than export it, to survive, unlike empires in the days of inter-imperialist rivalry that Lenin analyzed (cf. <http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch04.htm#v22zz99h-240-GUESS>). Washington did not invade Iraq in order to occupy it permanently and directly reconstruct its economy; it is occupying Iraq only so as to set up a new pro-Washington Iraqi regime, protected by pro-Washington Iraqi military and police forces, whose economic and geopolitical interests would more or less coincide with Washington's and restructure Iraq's politics and economy accordingly.
Yoshie