Imperial Irony.  

Spoke to James Bradley, author, "Flags of Our Fathers" (from which the Clint Eastwood movie is made) and the new "Imperial Cruise," on the 65th anniversary of Iwo Jima invasion, February 19, 1945.  James Bradley's Navy Corpsman father was with the 5th Marines, and was one of the men raising the flag (the second time) on Mt. Suribachi that became the famous photograph.  We spoke of the sad-eyed facts of the massacre on Iwo Jima -- from mid-February until late March, six weeks of slaughter and sacrifice.  The final casualty rate was unbelievable even to the strong stomachs and numb minds of the time: 26,000 US casualties from the Marines and Navy, and upward of 70,000 Japanese casualties, most KIA or self-destroyed.  Iwo Jima connects to the revelations in James Bradley's most recent book, "Imperial Cruise."  In the summer of 1905, TR sent his then-WarSec William Howard Taft on a mission to Japan, Korea and China, during the peace talks in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, between the Japanese conquerors of Port Arthur and the Russian losers.  Taft enraged and doomed the kingdom of Korea by handing it to the imperial appetite of Japan.  TR enraged Japan by not demanding a cash settlement from Russia for the victory over the tsarist troops.  China disdained TR and the US as invaders and exploiters who had suppressed the genuine longing of the Boxers at Beijing.  The result was an East Asia that was ripe and defenseless to the imperial aggressors in Tokyo -- men who toyed with joining Germany in the First War after 1916, men who built a fleet and army to launch the Manchuria campaign in 1932.  What attacked Pearl Harbor and the Philippines and Singapore in 1941 was the mature rot of the predators of 1905. It is imperial irony that scarred the 20th Century in the Pacific.  James Bradley and I discussed how the Marines and sailors who suffered on Iwo Jima did not know that they were fighting men in the delusion of imperial might that was cooked by American arrogance and ignorance forty years before.  I mentioned that the decision to use the atomic weapons six months later was a result of the shocking casualty numbers at Iwo Jima and the satanic Okinawa.  The imperial Japanese war plan in 1945 was to kill and wound as many Americans as possible; not to win, but rather to bleed the US to the armistice table with Japan undefeated.  The planned US invasions of the Homeland Islands would have been Iwo Jimas times fifty.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs (all that existed at the time) were the grim answer to an imminent apocalypse.