This should make Chimpy's worn-out "talkin' 'bout the peace with Koizumi" story even funnier!
A top US scholar of wartime Japan said Wednesday that the Bush administration's "war on terror" bore close parallels to Japan's past militarism through a defiance of international law.
Herbert Bix, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his landmark biography of wartime emperor Hirohito, said he believed US aerial bombings and alleged use of torture in Afghanistan and Iraq constituted war crimes.
"The current American rampage in Iraq and elsewhere, not to mention the Bush administration's threats of war against Iran, so clearly replicates Imperial Japan during the period when its leaders willfully disregarded international law and pursued the diplomacy of force," Bix said during a visit to Tokyo.
Japan defied the Nine-Party Treaty guaranteeing China's sovereignty, signed in 1922 in Washington, when imperial troops invaded Manchuria in 1931.
Bix compared Japan's action to current US efforts to scuttle the Treaty of Rome establishing the International Criminal Court, which President George W. Bush argues could unfairly target Americans.
He also said that senior US leaders -- not just rank-and-file soldiers -- should have been held to account for the killings of 24 civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha.
"US war criminality is justice institutionalised, as Japan's once was," Bix said.
"In today's America, torture is not only standard battlefield practice in the so-called war on terror. Torture is celebrated in American popular culture as evidenced by the popularity of '24,' a TV programme in which the hero confronts a ticking bomb scenario... designed to justify torture."
One of the first blog-based books, the anthology Special Plans examines Feith's role in misleading America into war. Buy from 
so, we have gone beyond nazis to the japs? oh goodie.
Posted by: pansypoo | October 31, 2007 at 11:18
Wow...it's not easy to piss off Japanese and US wingers at the same time, but Bix just might.
Posted by: caliph garrett | October 31, 2007 at 11:34
I'd like to see a Dem candidate say that they intended to hand the Bush administration over for trial for war crimes if elected. I have a feeling that would sell pretty well.
Oh, wait, was I snoring?
Posted by: Aaaargh | October 31, 2007 at 14:34
I'd like to see a Dem candidate say that they intended to hand the Bush administration over for trial for war crimes if elected.
i want to know why we only have ONE who is calling for Bush to be impeached?
but at least there is one.
Posted by: dirk gently | October 31, 2007 at 15:39