Seven months after Baghdad fell, the Bush administration is
confronting critics of its occupation strategy in Iraq by recalling
U.S. triumphs in postwar Germany and Japan. But some historians say
those are different stories.
The postwar reality in Germany and Japan, scholars say, was very
different from today's Iraq. Historians point out that while more
than 240 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq since Bush declared an
end to major hostilities on May 1, the total number of postwar
American casualties in occupied Germany and Japan was zero.
While campaigning in New Hampshire last month, President Bush
nevertheless repeated the comparison with postwar Germany and Japan,
nations that have since blossomed into affluent, stable democracies,
and posed no military threat to anyone in 50 years.
''America did not run from Germany and Japan following World War
II. We helped those countries become strong and decent democratic
societies that no longer waged war on America. That's our mission in
Iraq,'' Bush said.
John Dower, a professor of Japanese history at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, takes issue with the president's
comparison. ''Policy makers are using historical analogies comparing
occupied Germany and Japan to Iraq the way a drunk uses a lamp post,
not for illumination but for support,'' he said.
American GIs were so safe in Japan that they could move their
families there and Gen. Douglas MacArthur lived in Tokyo with his
wife and son. ''I can't imagine this happening in Iraq,'' Dower
said.
RECOGNIZED DEFEAT
In Germany, also, the Americans met cooperation, not violence,
said Harvard's German history professor Charles Maier.
Maier and Dower say U.S. forces in Germany and Japan met no armed
resistance because their populations felt legitimately defeated and
their leaders had surrendered unconditionally.
''Not all former Nazis became democrats overnight, to say the
least, but they realized how totally Germany had been defeated and
that there was no point in a resistance campaign,'' Maier said.
``Iraq was defeated too easily for the same consciousness to
pervade.''
In Japan, Emperor Hirohito even ordered his subjects to cooperate
with the occupiers -- a far cry from the situation today in Iraq,
where many people have never accepted defeat and former President
Saddam Hussein's whereabouts remain unknown.
Academics also warn that the Coalition Provisional Authority in
Iraq seems to lack the long-term planning and groundwork necessary
for a successful occupation.
In contrast, Washington had been preparing for the occupation of
Germany and Japan for several years before the end of the war, Maier
said, even training soldiers in civil affairs schools starting in
1942, three years before the end of the war.
POPULACE, NEIGHBORS
There are other major differences, experts say:
• In Iraq, U.S. troops face a
nation with a history of conflicts among Shiite and Sunni Muslims,
Kurds and Turkomans, unlike the largely homogenous Germany and
Japan.
• Iraq's neighbors pose problems
for U.S. rebuilding efforts, with Syria and Iran accused of failing
to secure their borders against infiltrators. By comparison, U.S.
troops in Germany and Japan enjoyed the cooperation of neighboring
nations that had been invaded by the defeated armies.
• Perhaps more importantly, Iraq
lacks the democratic experience of pre-war Germany and Japan, making
it harder to implement a U.S.-led democratization process,
historians say.
German history professor David Hamlin of Brown University added,
``German politicians could look back on their own past for a German
model of democracy in a way that Iraqis cannot.''
• Unlike World War II, when the
world applauded the U.S. war effort, the U.N. Security Council
refused to endorse the preemptive U.S. strike on Iraq and protesters
around the world denounced it as illegal and immoral.
• Finally, the U.S. rebuilding
policy in occupied Iraq is quite different from the one promoted in
Germany and Japan, the historians added. While the Bush
administration has been inviting foreign companies to help rebuild
Iraq's infrastructure, the U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan
preferred to issue reconstruction contracts to national
companies.
By limiting the role of Iraqi companies in their economy, Dower
added, the U.S. occupying authorities might be alienating Iraqi
professionals, whom he sees as a key ingredient for a successful and
cost-effective reconstruction.
Despite the differences, Harvard's Maier said, ``This doesn't
mean we can't make it work. But it will take a long time, and much
skill and
will.''