Two decades of U.S. policy appear to be rooted in a mistaken understanding of what happened that day. archive

  • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    4·
    6 months ago

    I’m not sure the US has the greatest track record when it comes to those sorts of occupational wars, realistically. I think the only times we’ve ever really seen it turn out well is maybe in vietnam, where we actively just like, lost the entire war and got sent packing, and they’re still having to deal with the ongoing problem of their country being contaminated by chemical incendiary weapons that produce larger percentages of birth defects.

    Not disputing anything you said about Vietnam, but we did alright with Japan and South Korea.

    • daltotron@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      I mean we did okay-ish with japan, and that was in the immediate post-ww2 period. There was a bunch of gaishas for a while that were complaining (iirc) about sexual assault from american troops, the nation immediately in the postwar period was fomented with a ton of nationalism and we didn’t really do a great job of undoing that. Though, their trajectory nowadays is pretty good, and it’s not like you can really blame all of that on the american occupation, really.

      South korea, though, even though I don’t know as much, I’m pretty sure we fucked up that one, since that war basically never ended and nowadays the country is a late stage hypercapitalist hellscape where plastic surgery to make you look more western is incredibly common along with the prevalence of cults and a wealth disparity that’s pretty US-adjacent.

      So I dunno if we did super well on those. Probably better than, say, Iraq, but I think our trajectory overall has been on a pretty consistent downwards trend since ww2.