John Derbyshire, contrasting his Third Way of nation-building to the First Way of punishment and the Second Way of empire:

Now and then I hear someone talk about a "1945 solution" for the Middle East. That is, we should wreak utter devastation on those places that have declared themselves our enemies. Then, as in Germany and Japan in 1945, we should move in an occupation administration and set the survivors on the path to civilized government.

Well, perhaps we should do this. It is certain, however, that we are not going to, unless our collective mentality undergoes some dramatic change. A "1945 solution" is not possible because, for better or worse, we are not who we were in 1945.

Derbyshire's article dovetails nicely with Asla Aydintasbas' well-intentioned criticism on NRO today: Has America's extreme politeness resulted in a far more dangerous, difficult task in Iraq?

I'm a Douglas MacArthur sort of man: what modest reading I have done of the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers in Tokyo has me convinced that to spare the rod is to spoil the infant liberal society. Occupied Japan did, of course, have its share of troubles and discord: a famine, a jaw-dropping black market and crime rate, Diets and Prime Ministers who did much to frustrate reforms and doing so with increasing success as the Occupation wore on. (There was an eventual "Reverse Course," that undid several reforms, directed by the State Department.) Attempts at purging government officials complicit in the militarist regime's atrocities were largely unsuccessful. I laugh whenever people claim that the Meiji Restoration placed the Japanese in a better position from which to adopt modern democracy (usually the antecedent for a claim that Arabs will never catch on). The Japanese introduction to liberty was quite an awkward one, a comedy of errors.

Nevertheless, we benefited from three things between 1945 and 1952, advantages absent in Iraq. The first was the fact that the Japanese owed us plenty; we were at war with them, not just their totalitarian regime. We had an enormous amount of political capital to wield.

The second was the Japanese penchant for conformity and obedience. Once they nominally understood the rules of the new game, most saw to it to dutifully follow (with the exception of a wave of cultural nihilism that swept in during the early 1950s). And there were no international press organizations egging the Japanese on to defy their occupiers.

The third advantage was exclusively American and pertinent to Derbyshire's article: the Baby Boomer generation - nursed on obnoxious, empty disestablishmentarianism - were only wisps of their harder, sterner fathers' fancy at the time. MacArthur stared down the naysayers, and the White House supported his progressive agenda through most of the Occupation. Now the kids of those men are calling the shots. Many of them are still lost in the ecstasy of their salad days, when they succeeded in unmercifully dooming millions of Vietnamese to Communist purgatory with civil violence, low-grade stimulants and bad music. Today they make television shows and write op-ed columns encouraging the Third World to take pride in squalor. Others, like President Bush and Paul Wolfowitz, have enough sense to buck the amoral, reflexively anti-American trend - but are perhaps too molded or constricted by political correctness to defy the Law of Being Really Nice to People Who Will Take Advantage of Said Niceness at the Expense of the People to Whom You Wanted to Be Nice in the First Place. At least the change won't happen overnight.

An optimist, I believe that Western meekness is partly an occupational hazard of liberal democracy, the acuteness of our current spell directly attributable to two generations of brats - and that September 11th has indeed reversed the supersaturation of complacency we suffered in the last quarter of the 20th Century. Withdrawal will be slow and the left's reactionaries insufferable. Iraq, it seems, is indeed the key to newfound Western confidence in both itself and the universality of democracy.

We can claim our own advantages today. Iraqis have bottom-level access to Western concepts via the internet - some are more intimate with the Founding Fathers than people my age. Modern technology has prevented humanitarian catastrophe. De-Ba'athification appears to be far more exacting than similar efforts in Germany and Japan. American military technology does well to compensate for the reluctance with which it is used. And, finally, as the president himself said last night: All good people want to be free and will work towards that end when given the opportunity. Americans are beginning to recognize that transcendence as a national ambition, younger people particularly, while they see professional "protesters" for the vain, unconcerned, unhelpful rabble that they are. Despite the failures and ominous portents, the Iraqi occupation has run circles around skeptics and critics alike. Our circumstances are the best they will and can be; I'm confident that they're good enough for victory.

INVERTEBRAES: An Iraqi expounds on the danger of negotiating with one's sworn enemies in the name of "diversity."