Occupy Iraq?
Pfaff, William
WILLIAM PFAFF OCCUPY IRAQ? Remember Germany & Japan There is "but one response possible for us: Force, force to the utmost, force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant force which...
...They say that what America did to make new democracies in Germany and Japan after World War II can be done again in Iraq...
...He consulted with the diplomats present at the ceremony, and reflected...
...The occupation of Germany was also supposed to last less than two years...
...The dynamic and educated Japanese, like the Germans, reconstructed their own country...
...and take control of German war-making capacity...
...On MacArthur's explicit orders, they accepted educational and social reforms of so liberal a nature as would scandalize the U.S...
...Congress today...
...De-Nazif ication mostly was dropped with the start of the cold war, when Germany was somewhat awkwardly turned into an ally...
...Economic reconstruction seriously began with the Marshall Plan in 1948, but the Germans really reconstructed their country themselves...
...About the same time, several new German books were having unexpected success...
...They are now in the Middle East, and speculation says they will stay there permanently, in new bases...
...Total victory in war commands total obedience from the defeated and opens the way to unhindered realization of political objectives...
...Iraq is their crucial experiment.l experiment...
...In this respect, as in others, they are the disciples of Ariel Sharon...
...Prosperity became their goal, and NATO became their foreign policy...
...Until a few days ago, there were ninety thousand U.S...
...He added that Iraq's occupation would restrict the army's ability to do other missions and "maintain high morale...
...Remember Germany & Japan There is "but one response possible for us: Force, force to the utmost, force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant force which shall make right the law of the world...
...Germans and Japanese "democratized" because they had no alternative...
...The economy was set on its way...
...They were threatened by Soviet Russia, and in the Japanese case by China, and America offered them security and rehabilitation within an international society dominated by democracies...
...That was Woodrow Wilson at the time of World War I. As you see, it's a short distance from him to George W. Bush...
...troops still there...
...Joint Chiefs to occupation commanders said they were to impose on the Germans recognition that they had brought their suffering onto themselves...
...Germany's occupation was meant to be punitive...
...Political reconstruction or "de-Nazification" got off to a bad start with distribution of thousands of questionnaires demanding the life history of everyone looking for a public post...
...The April 1945 order of the U.S...
...The Bush administration has said that military occupation of a defeated Iraq should last no more than two years, although the army chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki, shocked Congress last week by saying that "several hundred thousand soldiers" would be necessary to control the country...
...The Emperor listened by radio...
...The president's advisors are prepared to concede the social and political complexity of the Middle East but dismiss it by saying that, in the end, power trumps all...
...Victory in Iraq will sweep democracy into the Middle East...
...Then he informed his foreign minister that when General MacArthur was established in Tokyo, he would pay him a formal visit-as he did...
...Some of them already recommend that regime change in Iran should be the next American objective...
...The Bush White House takes total victory in Iraq for granted and assumes that unhindered political possibility will follow...
...All horrors brought on themselves, of course...
...The German people turned off their memories and worked...
...The "democratization" of Japan was simple...
...This is the traditional American position...
...As the agent of American power, it will pose a threat to its neighbors...
...All reawaken suppressed memories, of the terrible bombings of German cities, the savage expulsion of Germans from East Prussia and other places where they had lived for centuries, the ravages of Soviet conquest and occupation...
...The Bush people place their confidence in power...
...The Japanese people then understood that they were to become democrats...
...Douglas MacArthur received the Japanese surrender delegates aboard the battleship Missouri in the harbor of burned-out Tokyo, and told them that he renounced the spirit "of distrust, malice, or hatred...
...to arrest and punish war criminals...
...A nationalist writer, Ernst von Solomon, published his own savagely mocking answers to the form's 131 questions...
...This remained the German condition until very recently...
...It took him 541 pages (even in English translation and small print), and the book sold a quarter of a million copies in Germany...
...But nobody in Germany has talked about them for fifty-eight years...
...He said that the two sides "must rise to the higher dignity, which alone benefits the sacred purposes we are about to serve...
...A new Iraqi government will not be threatened...
...The Korean War arrived, and with it military orders to Japanese industry...
...to avoid all fraternization with them...
...Iraq in the short term will have no alternative to formal democratization...
...George Bush, without noticing, awakened the Germans from their political slumber last year by calling for Western war on Iraq...
Vol. 130 • March 2003 • No. 5
