Germany and Japan--and Iraq

“Occupational Hazards” by Douglas Porch, in The National Interest (Summer 2003), 1615 L St., N.W., Ste. 1230, Washington, D.C. 20036.

Some proponents of preventive war in Iraq suggested that postwar nation-building after the war would be a snap. Look at how the United States turned Germany and Japan into model democracies after World War II. But the task, in fact, wasn’t so easy then, and it will be even harder in Iraq, argues Porch, a professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

“The truth is that a full decade after World War II’s finale, many U.S. ‘nation-builders’ considered their efforts a nearly complete failure—and for good reason,” he writes. In surveys taken at the time, a majority of Germans said that their country’s “‘best time in recent history had been during the first years of the Nazis.’” Instead of gratitude and an enthusiastic embrace of democracy, U.S. reformers in Germany and Japan “encountered torpor, resentment, and resistance,” says Porch.

During the 1950s and 1960s, both the Germans and the Japanese overcame their resentment, and the two nations evolved into flourishing, peace-loving democracies. But that resulted less from Allied occupation policies, Porch says, than from various other factors, including “enlightened political leadership, ‘economic miracles’ spurred by the Marshall Plan in Europe and the Korean War in Japan, and the precedent, however frail, of functioning democratic government in both countries.” The Germans and the Japanese were talented, technologically advanced peoples, eager to put the devastating war behind them. “Above all, though, fear of the Soviets caused leaders in both countries, supported by their populations, to take shelter under the U.S. military umbrella.”

“Post-Saddam Iraq is a poor candidate to replicate the success of Japan and Ger­many,” Porch maintains. “Though once a relatively tolerant, pluralist society, Iraq has become a fractured, impoverished country, its people susceptible to hysteria and fanaticism. They are historically difficult to mobilize behind a common national vision, and no Yoshida Shigeru or Konrad Adenauer can be expected to emerge from a ruling class that inclines toward demagogy and corruption.” Despite the problem Iran poses for Iraq, there’s no equivalent of the Soviet Union to induce Iraqis to welcome U.S. protection. And “as for prewar experiences of Iraqi democracy, there are none.”

When most U.S. forces came home after World War II, the task of running Germany and Japan was, in effect, “swiftly turned over to the locals” in each country, says Porch, “with the U.S. military retaining vague supervisory powers.” In Iraq, by contrast, “a large U.S. garrison” is likely to be necessary for “the foreseeable future,” inevitably arousing further resentment.

Learning from the mistakes of the de-nazification effort in Germany, the United States should let the Iraqis “carry out their own ‘de-Baathification lite,’ complete with war crimes trials of Saddam’s top henchmen.” Instead of conducting “an invasive campaign of democratization and cultural engineering,” U.S. nation-builders should aim “to ‘normalize’ Iraq fairly quickly by putting a responsible leadership cadre in place while retaining a supervisory role with enough soldiers to back it up,” thus preventing the country from sliding into chaos.

The U.S.-British reconstruction of Iraq will be “neither brief nor cheap,” Porch says, but, “with any luck,” it will succeed eventually, as reconstruction succeeded eventually in Ger­many and Japan.