Never_forget

Uhuh....... As has been said in a post above, Japan was ready to surrender. Indeed, if I remember my history class correctly, the bomb was not dropped to bring about their surrender, it was dropped to bring about their surrender *sooner*. Basically, the US and Russia had an agreement that after a set deadline (which I cannot recall -- though I remember it was to be not long after the bombs were dropped) Russia would have free reign to attack Japan. Thus, the US wanted Japan to surrender to them before that deadline to prevent Russia from taking Japan. Simply put, they did not want another Soviet state to bother them.

I'm not going to debate whether or not this was the "right thing to do", but if people are going to discuss the incident I would rather they do it with their facts straight. Other versions of this decision were often given for the simple reason that so many people were close to the event (in time). Basically, anyone who knows aobut history will tell you that the "full story" concerning many events is not available until 75-100 years later, after anyone involved is dead.

Anyway, as for Iraq... saying you can swoop in and "save" them with democracy is somewhat naive. Historically, democracy has best been acheived by change from within a country, not without (the only real exceptions to this I can think of are the result of the world wars, which were obviously special circumstances). And if we're going to look at examples, lets use something *recent* instead of something that happened over 50 years ago. In Afghanistan, the obvious example, change has lasted only as long as US media attention has been on the country. No more media, no more motivation for the US government, the country reverts. But Iraq will be different. Of course it will.