One of the most puzzling things about our adventure in Iraq has been the seeming near-total ignorance of anyone in government - including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who's old enough to remember the events in question - of the methods we used to restore order in the last two countries which we occupied for any length of time.
I speak, of course, of Germany and Japan after their defeat in the Second World War.
Of the two, postwar Germany seems the closer analogy; a secular uni-party totalitarian state, a tyrant who met his self-inflicted end out of the public eye (to this day, there are those who claim that Hitler escaped to South America, or Antarctica, or what-have-you), a fearsome secret police apparatus, legions of petty bureaucrats who made their livelihood by serving the regime in one form or another, and a wrecked public infrastructure. The situation was complicated by legions of displaced persons ('DPs') comprised variously of unhoused civilians, freed POWs, and of course the survivors of the concentration camps.
Yet there were Civil Affairs units moving forward with the various armies as they advanced, setting up registration centers, issuing officially-recognized ID cards and scrip, and generally keeping order while the front lines advanced. And once Admiral Doenitz, Hitler's successor, signed the instrument of surrender . . .
Oh, yes - the Germans surrendered, you see. Unconditionally. Although there were holdouts here and there for a time (reports of a Redoubt in Bavaria proved to be false; the feared 'Werewolf' guerilla-type uprising of Nazi diehards never occurred, just vice, petty crime, and black marketeering on a grand scale), by and large, the fighting was quickly over and work begun on the administration of the defeated nation.
Sectors of responsibility were established, and the organization of the Occupied Military Government, United States (OMGUS), proceed apace. General Lucius Clay was named as the U.S. Military Governor of Occuptied Germany, and handed many crises great and small with great aplomb as the United States worked to establish a de-Nazified, democratically-elected government in the face of relentless westward pressure by the USSR. This process took some eight years, and is one of the great examples of American foresight and generosity in the Twentieth Century.
General MacArthur's accomplishments along these lines in postwar Japan were in some ways even more remarkable.
None of this happened spontaneously. A great deal of planning for occupation took place prior to the Allied victory, beginning in 1943 - two full years before Hitler and his mistress met their end in that desolate Berlin bunker.
And so, fifty years later, we've apparently learned nothing from the experience.
Not for want of documentation - the full text of The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany, 1944 - 1946 has long been available online to anyone in the present Administration who cared to have a look. The numerous popular histories of the period notwithstanding, there's much to be found of relevance in this official account, paid for with your tax dollars.
Authored by Dr. Earl F. Ziemke, USMC (ret.) and first printed in 1975, the work contains a great deal of useful information concerning the running of an occupied country. For example, on the matter of surrender:
. . . But the years between the wars had revealed, from the World War II viewpoint, a catastrophic defect in the 1918 armistice, namely, the Germans had not been convinced of their defeat. At the last minute on 6 November 1918, the German Army had refused to send a military representative to negotiate with the Allies. Mathias Erzberger, a civilian and a defeatist in the eyes of some Germans, had negotiated and signed the armistice. The military leadership, aided by right-wing politicians and press, had for two decades thereafter claimed to have been stabbed in the back. In the United States, many believed that Hitler had been successful at maneuvering his country into war because the German people and soldiers had been hoodwinked into believing they had not really been defeated in 1918. Both the form and the language of the surrender consequently seemed to be crucial in preventing a third world war.
Leaving aside the small problem of the United States not actually having been in a declared state of war with Iraq, it seems to me that a public surrender ceremony, even one completely staged-managed for the propaganda value alone (after decades under the heel of one despot or another, one rather thinks the Iraqis take that sort of thing in stride) would provide an important break-point in the public psyche, demonstrating that the Ba'athists had in fact been defeated in the field and undermining irredentism on the part of the diehards. And then there's the small matter of the electricity and other public utilities:
. . . Military government was competing with the image left behind by the enemy. In this competition, First Army G-5 had concluded, moral superiority and technical expertise needed to be backed by what Americans too often regarded as superficial appearances: offices arranged not only to be worked in but to look efficient, flags prominently displayed, officers who looked and acted their parts.
Once again, Dr. Ziemke demonstrates that no more than half a century ago, we seemed to know what we were doing. Contrast this with the almost unbelieveable fact that, in today's Army, there is precisely one active-duty Civil Affairs battalion to be found.
American soliders aren't much good as garrison troops, either - they want to have a clearly-defined mission, the motivations for which can be readily discerned and which are aimed at a general improvement in the state of things. Dr. Ziemke again:
. . . Here the Germans, alleged nation of sinners against peace and human decency though they might lie, became people who could be sick, hungry, and frightened, old and young, pretty and pitiable, guilty and innocent. Even though they might accept the idea of German collective guilt, the American soldiers did not feel at ease as agents of collective retribution.
By our signal failure to develop and implement a well-thought-out plan for the efficient administration of post-conflict Iraq, we've let down not only the Iraqi people, but our own soldiers, as well. By failing to establish a public, rigorous, and thorough de-Ba'athification program, we unwittingly lend credence to various conspiracy theories concerning the true motives behind the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, whatever those may've been (to my mind, we bombed and invaded the wrong country).
Surely, we can aspire to do at least as well as our forbears?
