It isn't just that the total defeat and utter devastation of Japan nullifies the comparison with Iraq (which it does). There is something else. There is the completely different U.S. approach to Japan's animating, warlike state religion of Shintoism, which, not incidentally, bears striking similarities to the animating, warlike state religion of Islam.

In 1945, our government was of one mind regarding state Shintoism. Lewis quotes Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, who wrote: "Shintoism, insofar as it is a religion of individual Japanese, is not to be interfered with. Shintoism, however, insofar as it is directed by the Japanese government, and as a measure enforced from above by the government, is to be done away with. ... There will be no place for Shintoism in the schools. Shintoism as a state religion -- National Shinto, that is -- will go. ... Our policy on this goes beyond Shinto. ... The dissemination of Japanese militaristic and ultra-nationalistic ideology in any form will be completely suppressed."

And it was, with fabulous results.

Obviously, there have been no analogous U.S. efforts to "de-jihadize" Islamic public culture even as the United States has spent lives, limbs, money and years trying, essentially, to stop the jihad in the Islamic Middle East -- not even, to take a manageable example, in the U.S.-funded Palestinian Authority, where state-run media continue to incite Islamically motivated violence against Jews and Americans. And then there are all those U.S.-fostered constitutions that enshrine Sharia law -- just the sort of ideological concession our forebears would never have made.

Bottom line? History shows that the conditions that drove the model transformation of Japan do not exist today with regard to the Islamic Middle East. We're going to need another strategy -- for starters, an immigration policy and new laws to halt the creep of Sharia -- to ward off the Islamization of the West.