U.S. Scholar Links Bush Admin Neocons to Imperial Japan

Pulitzer Prize winner Herbert Bix has come out and said that neocons of today, particularly the Bush administration, are very closely related to imperial Japan under the late emperor Hirohito. Bix is an expert on imperial Japan, and has actually said for years that the comparisons between post-9/11 U.S. government are plenty. He has stated that the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq was far worse than Pearl Harbor, and it "will live in infamy." It only makes sense that he would come out with more statements against this criminal government as they attempt to dupe Iran into a war for imperial supremacy in the Middle East.

"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."

But Bix, a professor at Binghamton University in New York state, said he remained optimistic for change as most Americans were opposed to "the Washington consensus."