This Ain't Revisionist History, Folks!

Back in late April, I spoke publicly (rare for a moral coward) in praise of the U.S. occupation of Japan. To this day, General Douglas MacArthur is venerated in Japanese popular culture. His Cadillac (nice touch for an occupier) has a place of honor in a venerated Tokyo nightclub. I failed to mention the occupation of Germany. Iraq and it Ba'athist Party comes closer to Nazi Germany than to Japan (although Saddam Hussein aspired to the status of the Japanese Emperor: a god). Ah, the lessons of revisionist history. I don't think being President of the U.S. (POTUS) is as much fun these days for George II. We're gettin' down to the short rows, now. The mistakes, misstatements, and miscalculations are out front and obvious to everyone (except W, Cheney, Rummy, and all of their blind supporters). If this be treason—said Patrick Henry—make the most of it.

[x Asia Times—July 2003]
Middle East

Occupying Iraq: The lessons of history
By Alexander Casella

In early June, the American provisional authority in Iraq sent a message to some 50 former Iraqi ambassadors abroad instructing them to report back to Baghdad. Forty-six of the ambassadors contacted complied with the instruction. This was not the reaction that one would have expected from the failed bureaucracy of a failed state and for good reason. Iraq, whatever its regime, was never a failed state.

Its governing structure, including the police apparatus, had a long civil service tradition going back to the days of the Ottoman Empire. Likewise, though the country has large pockets of poverty, it has not only an educated middle class but also a substantive number of well-trained technocrats, which include some of the best doctors, engineers, architects and scientists in the Middle East. Thus, given the right circumstances, Iraq was not short of trained Iraqis to run the country and to do so well.

The contention that in the wake of the American invasion the governing structure of Iraq simply collapsed and has now to be "rebuilt" simply does not hold water. Conversely, the governing structure did become inoperative overnight. Why it did so will probably never be fully explained but it is well possible that Washington's insistence on "regime change" combined with its inability to communicate to the grass roots what it had in store for the country - all indications point to the fact that while the war was meticulously planned, hardly any thought had been given to how to run Iraq after Saddam's fall - induced the governing bureaucracy to literary vanish. The end result was a vacuum, which as of now is still mostly unfilled.

There is little doubt that had the US seriously planned for a post-Saddam administration, it would not have had to change practically its whole transitional administrative team only one month after the fall of Baghdad. While this lack of advance planning as regards a strategic exercise, of which the military stage was only the first phase, is downright incomprehensible, it is not the first time in history that immediate concerns overshadowed the need for a long-term occupation strategy.

Though the post-World War II era is hardly one of peace, it is a rare occurrence in which one nation invaded another with the publicly stated purpose of imposing its authority on it, changing its regime and transforming it into a client state.

Even at the height of the Cold War, outright invasion of a foreign state without the pretext of supporting a real or hypothetical local force was not the norm. Thus while the Soviet Union did subjugate Eastern Europe, it did so by imposing, under its umbrella, the rule of local communist parties. Likewise, its invasion of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 essentially sought to reinstate pro-Soviet local communist hardliners who had been ousted by more liberal internal forces. Ultimately, until the American invasion of Iraq, the last time outright invasion occurred was in 1945 when the US defeated Germany and Japan and sought to substitute its authority for that of the Nazis and the Japanese imperial government.

Granted, there were two major differences between Germany and Japan on one hand and Iraq on the other. Unlike Iraq, Germany and Japan had both formally surrendered and had populations which by tradition were respectful, if not submissive, to authority. But beyond these two important differences, the basic issue remained the same: how does an army, which does not wish to resort to unrestricted slaughter, manage the everyday running of a conquered country? The answer is that it does not.

When the Germans defeated France in 1940 and occupied Paris, they left untouched the whole management structure of the French capital. Waterworks, electricity, sewage, road maintenance, postal service, public transportation and the like continued to operate as they did before the occupation. Likewise the Paris police force, by and large, continued to function under the Germans as it had under a French government. Indeed, when in July 1942 the Germans decided on the mass roundup of the Jews in Paris, it was the French police who made the arrests and the Parisian public buses which transported them to the holding center from which they were sent to the death camps. And while the French police ultimately did revolt they did so only in the last days of the occupation when the Germans had withdrawn most of their forces from Paris and the Allied divisions were one day away from the French capital.

This same pattern was repeated in all the Western countries occupied by the Germans. The local administrations were left in place with the Nazis restricting themselves to exercising military control through their army and political control through their secret police, the Gestapo.

While in moral terms the Allied occupation of Germany can in no way be compared to the German occupation of the Western European democracies that it had defeated in 1940, the purely practical issue of how to manage a defeated state remained the same.

Five weeks after Germany's defeat, Sir Ivor Pink, deputy undersecretary at Britain's Foreign Office, wrote to a colleague complaining that he had trouble convincing the press that the Allies had a policy toward Germany. Sir Ivor had reason to be concerned. There was no Allied policy. All that stood for a policy were two paragraphs in a handbook prepared in 1944 by the Allied command and then withdrawn. The first paragraph provided that "under no circumstances" should active Nazis or their sympathizers be retained in office. The second paragraph stated that the "administrative machinery of certain dissolved Nazi organizations may be used when necessary". Very soon, "necessary" became the rule rather than the exception.

On paper, the Allies had made the "de-Nazification" of Germany a priority. This provided that before being integrated in a new governing structure, Germans had to prove that they had not been active Nazis. De-Nazification required the completing of a highly complex questionnaire, which would then be submitted to a de-Nazification board. Confronted by some 13 million questionnaires on one hand, which would have taken years to process, and the pressing requirement of normalizing everyday life, the system soon collapsed under its own weight and was quietly shelved.

With Germany literarily in rubble, feeding the population was one of the Allies' pressing priorities. This required that the railways system, by which practically all food supplies were transported, be reactivated at the earliest. To undertake this demanding task the US occupation authorities could find no better candidate than Theodor Ganzenmuller. As state secretary in the Ministry of Transportation, Ganzenmuller was the man credited with keeping the German railway system operating throughout the war years. Even at the height of the Allied bombing campaign, Ganzenmuller always made sure that the trains kept moving. He even received a personal commendation from Himmler, the chief of the SS and the German police for having ensured, confronted with the greatest odds, that the trains kept on running between the Jewish ghettos in Poland and the extermination camps. "I thank you for your efforts," commented Hitler's adjudant, Wolf, noting "with satisfaction" that "for two weeks now a train has been carrying every day 5,000 members of the chosen people to Treblinka". Treblinka was one of the main extermination centers where over 600,000 were gassed. Seeking someone with the expertise to rebuild the railways in their zones, the Americans proposed Ganzenmuller for the job. The choice however proved too much for Washington, which cancelled the appointment and chose instead to give the job to Ganzenmuller's superior, Dr Dorpmuller, Hitler's minister for transportation.

Keeping law and order was another challenge for the Allies. While the Reich's main security service, which included the secret police, the Gestapo, as well as the Nazi party security service, was disbanded, the Order Police, which included the criminal police, were left structurally intact. Thus the cop on the beat was for all practical purposes kept in his job. Given that the Order Police had been infiltrated by the SS, it became a haven for former Nazis. Thus when in May 1946 Kurt Schumacher, the leader of the new Social Democratic Party went to Hanover to give a talk and was assigned five bodyguards from the local police, he discovered that 4 were former SS members, including one captain and one major. All had been recruited by the local police chief who was himself a former SS man. It was a process that repeated itself thousands of times all over Germany.

By the time the German Federal Republic was born in 1949, not only was having been a Nazi no source of shame, but it was former Nazis who were rebuilding Germany. By the mid-1950s about 60 West German ambassadors were former high-ranking Nazis. Practically all the former Nazi teachers, lawyers, judges and civil servants had been reinstated and the drafter of the 1934 Nazi racial laws that paved the way for the Holocaust had been appointed chancellor Konrad Adenauer's state secretary. Ultimately it could hardly have been otherwise. Given the legacy of history, the choice was either to rebuild Germany using former - and unrepentant - Nazis or not rebuilding it at all. De-Nazification had to await the passing away of a generation.

Even with the wisdom of hindsight, it is difficult to see how the Allies could have chartered a different course for the new Germany. Granted, reinstating former Nazis was not a deliberate policy, but complacency, the requirements of the Cold War, expediency and the wish to turn the page. Turning a blind eye to murder became a matter of convenience.

Half a century after the fall of Nazi Germany, the American occupation of Iraq raises many of the same questions. What will work in Baghdad will not work in Basra and might not be required in Mosul, but the basic issue remains the same: how do you run a conquered country? Three months after an occupation that is becoming increasingly contentious, Washington is slowly rediscovering that if you want to rule a foreign country you must empower the local police, pay the salaries of the former military, keep the local administration functioning, use local contractors to maintain and repair utilities. Armies are made to wage war and not to keep law and order. And as for the much-vaunted "regime change", there are enough past examples to show that it comes from the top down and not vice versa.

With time running short and for want of a comprehensive occupation policy, the US authorities in Iraq are now rediscovering the wheel, namely reactivating the local police and paying the salaries of former soldiers. It is possible, just possible, that had these measures been advertised and taken three months ago, the US would be in a far better position than it is today in confronting a situation of increased insecurity.

The lessons were there to be learned. To its chagrin, the US is now slowly discovering that they were either forgotten or ignored.

(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd.