| Author | Message | | Guest | | Posted: Sun Oct 27, 2002 2:52 am Post subject: Reject Bush's Iraq-Japan parallel |
| Posted on Thu, Oct. 17, 2002
TRUDY RUBIN
Reject Bush's Iraq-Japan parallel
So now we know where the Bush team is heading with its plans for The Day After. Senior administration officials say that they want to establish a military government in Baghdad after ousting Saddam Hussein. A U.S.-led military government. It would be modeled on the 6 ½-year U.S. occupation of Japan after World War II.
A U.S. military commander, presumably Gen. Tommy Franks, would play Gen. Douglas MacArthur. U.S. troops and civilians would run Iraq until it was disarmed. We would set up a democracy in Baghdad, just as we did in Tokyo.
We Americans are headed for very big trouble.
The Iraq-Japan parallel is so flawed, it makes me wonder whether anyone on the Bush team has bothered to read any history. Or if it means what it says.
Have Bush officials talked to John Dower, author of Embracing Defeat, the brilliant, Pulitzer-winning account of our occupation of Japan?
''Nothing that went on in Japan is a model for Iraq,'' Dower told me. ``Virtually everything that made the occupation of Japan a success is absent from the current situation.''
In postwar Japan, Dower points out, the U.S. occupation had total moral legitimacy in the eyes of the world, Japan's neighbors and the Japanese people. U.S. forces and allies had defeated the Japanese aggressor, and the Tokyo government had signed an unconditional surrender. The Japanese leadership and public accepted the U.S. role.
This meant that ''Supreme Commander MacArthur had supreme power,'' says Dower. ``He had enormous charisma in Japan and on the American political scene. He could rule by fiat.''
Japan, moreover, wasn't riven by the ethnic, religious and tribal factions that characterize Iraq. MacArthur could work through existing, acquiescent, Japanese institutions of government and make them implement his dramatic changes.
Compare this to the situation the Bush team faces in Iraq. If we go in alone, few other countries will recognize the legitimacy of the U.S. presence. Iraq's neighbors all are poised to meddle in the country. Within Iraq, there is no emperor to lend legitimacy to U.S. rule.
Initially, if Saddam Hussein's demise is quick and civilian casualties low, the U.S. forces may be welcomed by many Iraqis as liberators. But that welcome soon will wear thin. And our MacArthur clone will face a very different scene than did the supreme commander. He won't have his predecessor's absolute power, because there will be no unconditional Iraqi surrender.
Yet without MacArthur's absolute power, accepted by the Japanese and by the world, Japan would not have morphed into a democracy. That power enabled the general and his team of New Deal idealists to ''crack open a repressive system,'' says Dower. It also allowed MacArthur's team to shape a new constitution and give grass-roots Japanese reformers a say.
Instead, a non-supreme U.S. commander would face a fractured Iraq, in which Kurds, Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims and tribal leaders are jockeying fiercely for power; also, democratic liberals are few. In such a situation, could U.S. forces override Iraq's history of repression and help a fractured Iraqi opposition install democratic institutions? Not likely.
Our non-supreme commander would have his hands full rooting out Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. And his biggest challenge would be one that MacArthur never faced. Japan had no repository of oil. Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the Mideast, and U.S. occupation would make us responsible for their redevelopment and disposition.
Already, many Arabs -- and Europeans -- suspect that our real motive for going into Iraq is to control its oil. Any U.S. occupation would be quickly judged by how it handles the oil issue and disperses oil revenues.
Indeed, the Bush team will be caught in a double bind if it hews to the Japan model of occupation. An administration that detests nation-building will have committed itself to the most profound kind of social engineering. But it will be doing so without the tools that MacArthur needed to remake Japan.
The history of our Japan occupation is breathtaking, the idealism of MacArthur's team admirable. But read Embracing Defeat; you'll realize that we are in a different era, Iraq is in a different region -- and an Iraq invasion would leave us in a totally different geopolitical fix.
The biggest favor anyone could do the Bush team is to send it a dozen copies of Dower's book.
Trudy Rubin is an editorial-board member for The Philadelphia Inquirer. | |  | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
