HONOLULU -- U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld likes to point to the American occupation of Japan after World War II to assert that America is moving faster to rebuild and reform Iraq than the Americans did in seven years of remaking Japan, starting in 1945. Therefore, he says, Americans and critics elsewhere should be patient.
The defense secretary may be right in asserting that a comparison of the occupation of Japan with that of Iraq could be illuminating. Perhaps inadvertently, however, he only underscores the extraordinary difficulties of bringing peace and reconstruction to Iraq.
In Japan, the most important element in the American success was the late Emperor, who shaped the Japanese attitude toward the occupation. On Aug. 15, 1945, he decreed that Japan would surrender and called upon Japanese to "bear the unbearable and endure the unendurable" during the first foreign invasion of their homeland.