No, It’s Not a Cakewalk
04.07.2008 - 8:16 AMWhoever thought, before the U.S. invaded, that bringing peace and tranquility to Iraq would be a simple task was wildly wrong. But is it an impossible task?
More than 60 years ago, during World War II, Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower didn’t think that his similar, even more daunting, mission was impossible. By the time he had completed his crusade in Europe and thanked his staff for a job well done at a farewell ceremony in Frankfurt in July 1945, the German army, or Wehrmacht, no longer existed, Hitler was dead, the Nazi Party had been dissolved, war criminals were behind bars awaiting trial and retribution, de-Nazification had begun, and western Germany — the part not occupied by the Soviet army — was on its way to becoming one of the most successful liberal democracies of the Western world.
So writes David Stafford in Sunday’s Washington Post. Stafford is the author of Endgame 1945: The Missing Final Chapter of World War II. He finds in Iraq “poignant echoes of the post-WWII experience” and wonders if we could have avoided major mistakes by paying more attention to that historical episode. But he also finds “some small crumb of comfort for optimists” and notes that it
is too soon to declare that the mission has failed. Sen. John McCain’s 100-year horizon for a U.S. presence in Iraq may be stretching things. But let’s not forget that the postwar occupation of Germany lasted for a full decade.
Iraq, as Stafford notes, is vastly different from the conquered Germany of 1945. But still, the parallel is compelling.
Rebuilding a nation is possible. But even in the best of circumstances, it takes effort, time, patience and pragmatism. As 1945 confirms, liberation from a dictator in itself offers no easy path to peace or democracy. Battlefield victory is the easy bit. Building peace is a constant struggle — and it’s a matter of years, not weeks.
Stafford’s reminder of the difficulties we as a nation faced in the past is vitally important. The question of the day: will the U.S. stay in Iraq for the years needed to finish the job?
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April 7th, 2008 at 12:23 PM
It is worth noting about WWII that we had no firmer idea what our political intentions were in the aftermath of surrender, in Germany and Japan, than we had in Iraq in 2003. Bush catches a lot of heat for that, but he actually had a clearer concept of his overall intention — to regime-change Saddam — than the Allies had in WWII. We decided to pursue “absolute surrender” with both Germany and Japan, but to say that we knew what form that would take, beforehand, is ahistorical. Bush was certain, by contrast, that the decisive combat phase of the conflict would not be over until Saddam was out of power.
The US armed forces also had a better, more comprehensive prior plan for the “consolidation” and “disengagement” phases in Iraq than was ever the case in WWII. By 2003 we had learned to plan better for expeditionary warfare.
Two post-invasion political decisions set the course for the occupation: the decision in early May 2003 to NOT turn Iraq over to the government formed by a cohort of Iraqis, but to establish the Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer; and the decision to accept a ceasefire with terrorists in Fallujah in the spring of 2004, and to leave them holding Fallujah rather than recapturing it, which our forces were well capable of doing. The Fallujah decision in 2004 was the watershed event that encouraged an influx of transnational Sunni wahhabists into Iraq. Prior to that time the main outside influence was Iranian, and confined largely to the Shi’a areas of Basrah Province and the road to Baghdad from the south.
Both of these decisions were made along the lines advocated by the State Department. Bush made the first (to establish the CPA rather than recognizing a new Iraqi government), on the advice of policy traditionalists who had opposed the invasion beforehand, and were concerned about a new Iraqi government exercising independence too early. They may have been correct in their calculation that instability would result, but it is not clear that THAT form of instability would have been noticeably less telegenic or quiescent than what we have had instead. It is clear, however, that Ahmad Chalabi was right in pointing out that by choosing to go ahead with the CPA, we took ownership of whatever resulted.
Bremer made the other decision, to cede Fallujah to the terrorists. This was also a decision made along policy traditionalist lines: whenever possible, choose stasis and negotiation, even with terrorists. It is correct to recognize that the conditions were optimal for such a decision, given the minimal occupation footprint being administered by Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, but we must also recognize that (a) the troops in country in the spring of 2004 could have taken Fallujah without imperiling security elsewhere; and (b) negotiation and ceasefire in Fallujah were the preferred course of Bremer and his CPA civilian advisers, not a fallback position to which they were forced. They saw relinquishing Fallujah, at least in part, as a means of demonstrating conciliatory goodwill to Saddamist Sunnis — a questionable line of thought, at best.
We can be sure that no matter what we do it will be second-guessed. We forget that the occupation of Germany was relentlessly second-guessed, and was never a matter of a thousand flowers blooming. At the same remove we are today from the invasion of Iraq, in post-war Germany we had already seen the Berlin Airlift, and were beginning to conclude that it would not be possible to reunite Germany under a single government — because of our former ally the Soviet Union. As successful as the rehabilitation of West Germany was, it was at least as great a tragedy that the Berlin Wall was constructed, and millions of East Germans enslaved for more than four decades, as that any post-invasion political decision has been made in Iraq.
Who here remembers that the United States occupied Okinawa, and did not return it to Japan, until 1971? Victory and regime-change aren’t for sissies.
April 7th, 2008 at 2:45 PM
That is not true. For the first three years after the war Germany was a pile of rubble. The first two winters were bitter cold with the British shivering because their coal was needed to keep millions of Germans from freezing to death. Tens of thousands were dying in POW camps. It was only in 1948 that the Marshall Plan started up and the slow transformation of Germany’s cities from hills of broken bricks began. And that was largely because the Iron Curtain had descended and it was necessary to counteract the wide despair and misery that threatened to turn Germany, as well as France and Italy, communist.
April 7th, 2008 at 7:08 PM
Germany and Japan were nations before WWII and were nations after their defeat. In Japan, the emperor commanded an end to hostilities, which was obeyed. Iraq is not a nation, it is a mixture of ethnic and religious groups placed within articifical boundaries. There is more identification with ones tribal/religious leader than with the government or an elected leader. Hence, there will be different problems ahead. I once asked a Pakistani in the NW Frontier how were they able to keep British era steam engines running? His response: “How do we keep the country running? ” His response was a reference to the autonomous tribal groups in the NW Frontier. One positive aspect might be the sharing of oil revenues amongst the groups so that disrupting the “state” production capability would not be in any groups interest.
April 8th, 2008 at 10:54 AM
WilliamInWien Says:
But for how long before WWII? Until 1870 Germany had been a duodecimo patchwork of independent kingdoms and principalities. The Weimar Republic was a 14 year serving of democracy but its taste spoiled by side dishes like a lost war, political humiliation, hyperinflation, depression and mass unemployment. By 1945 the Germans had been crammed with thirteen years of intense anti western, indoctrination.
As to Japan, it had only moved out of the feudal age with the Maji restoration of 1890. In the summer of 1945 its culture, history and political orientation was as antipodal to ours as Nazi Germany yet both had America’s political culture shoved down their throats.
Moreover, they swallowed it. It went down, it was digested and it changed those two countries. And not because they had been unitary nation states, but because they were given no choice. No sympathetic media supported any resistance. Totally defeated they dared not resist or complain. The example of Japan’s compliant emperor was also, of course, enormously helpful.
But the fact remains that both those countries were turned in our direction because they were given no alternative. Their conversion was achieved by force, and swiftly and relatively cheaply. The Marshall Plan took annually 10% of our tax dollars for five years, and that did the trick.
Today we are hamstrung by our own PC, our fear of offending a world public that is highly anti-American, an opposition party that is more interested in the administration’s failure than in the nation’s success, and our reluctance to offend a fanatic 7th century mindset.