Postwar: Iraq Is No Japan

For all the detailed previews of the planned U.S. military offensive against Saddam Hussein, scant information has been released on what the Bush administration proposes to do with Iraq after the shooting stops. So far, President Bush and team seem to have settled on a military occupation of about 18 months, time enough, they suggest, to restore order, feed the refugees, rebuild the economy and create “institutions of democracy.”

In outlining the post-Hussein future, the administration has made much of the “Japanese model,” the successful U.S. occupation of Japan by Gen. Douglas MacArthur and his small army of democratizers after World War II. The countries and people may be different, we are told, but the U.S. objective is the same. If we brought democracy to Japan, why not Iraq?

I was in Japan during the initial year of MacArthur’s occupation. After landing in Sasebo in September 1945, I served through 1946 as a Navy intelligence officer and, later, as flag lieutenant to the vice admiral commanding U.S. naval forces in Japan. In 1949, I returned to Japan as Time magazine’s Tokyo bureau chief to cover the occupation’s final stages

Japan’s cities in 1945 were almost a wasteland. Gen. Curtis LeMay’s “carpet bombing” had left Nagoya and Tokyo as devastated as Nagasaki and Hiroshima. U.S. officials were surprised at the extent to which the Japanese people seemed resigned to their situation. Ironically, once the emperor ordered the Japanese to surrender, the enforced discipline of Japan’s militarist years took over, making the task of occupation easier. The Japanese were a disillusioned, hungry people whose psyches were as shattered as their cities. At first, they obeyed the Americans. Then, they welcomed them. Submission was almost total. MacArthur, after all, was not just an American general. He was the supreme commander for the Allied powers, representing the entire victorious international coalition. All this worked in America’s favor.

Another advantage to the success of the occupation was that Japan’s population was so homogeneous. The Japanese modernized their politics during the Meiji Restoration, progressing toward the democratic parliamentary government of the 1920s, only to be caught up and betrayed by nationalistic militarists. Before the Pacific war, moreover, there existed a long tradition of Japanese-American friendship, from U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry to baseball and Hollywood movies. With the militarists purged and discredited, MacArthur and his democratizers could implement reforms through a smoothly functioning and, on the whole, cooperative government bureaucracy.

Americans, though occupiers, were appreciated. With all its flaws, democratization worked, although it took seven years to do the job.

Three years of careful preparation also played a big part in ensuring the success of the occupation. American-style democratization was not just MacArthur’s idea. Since 1943, the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, well stocked with people knowledgeable about Japan, had worked in Washington on long-range plans for a democratizing postwar regime. The daily business of the occupation was also facilitated by the presence on the ground of several thousand intelligence personnel -- I was one of them -- who had been thoroughly trained in the Japanese language.

Occupying and governing a postwar Iraq would be a totally different proposition. Iraq’s population is divided by ethnicity, religion and politics: mutually hostile Shiite and Sunni Muslims, secularist pan-Arabs, Kurds, Assyrian Christians, even Bedouin tribesmen. The probability of revolt -- even civil war -- after the collapse of Hussein’s government is high. It should be remembered that after the defeat of Hussein’s army in the Gulf War, Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north revolted. The administration’s rhetoric notwithstanding, it’s doubtful that Iraqis would welcome Americans in their country.

Finally, Iraq has no democratic tradition. It knows only the rule of strongmen. When I visited Baghdad on a reporting trip in 1957, I interviewed the redoubtable Nuri Said, the former Turkish officer -- and Lawrence of Arabia’s World War I adjutant -- who was postwar Iraq’s first dictator. Although he exuded confidence about building an Arab nation, his associates seemed nervous. Barely a year later, most of them, Nuri included, were torn to pieces by street mobs celebrating the military coup of Gen. Abdul Karim Kassem. Kassem, in turn, was executed a few years later in another bloody power grab. Others succeeded him and met equally violent ends. Hussein is only the most recent -- and most vicious -- of a bad lot.

The Bush administration’s Future of Iraq project certainly has not spent the time and energy planning the occupation of Iraq that Americans did for Japan. That’s understandable since Iraq has been a full-blown administration cause for less than a year. But its approach to Iraq’s long-term future has been casual, not to say dismissive. Indeed, according to one policymaker, John R. Bolton, undersecretary of State for arms control and international security, “Iraq is fundamentally where the Iraqis live, and they ought to assume responsibility for the government as soon as they can.”

But exactly who are “they”? And how does a foreign occupying force find out?

I’m reminded of the catch-as-catch-can occupation of South Korea by U.S. troops in 1945. In contrast to the painstaking preparation for the occupation of Japan, Washington simply dispatched an Army corps commander to take charge after the war. Largely lacking expert advice, Gen. John R. Hodge made about every mistake in the book. He ignored a network of patriotic but hastily organized Korean “Peoples’ Committees,” instead relying on the Japanese police to keep order. Later, his new American military government appointed Korean advisors who had collaborated with the hated Japanese colonial administration.

The resulting civil disturbances in South Korea were a big factor in laying the new Republic of Korea open to invasion from the Communist North. Even after the Korean War, the rule of authoritarians masquerading as democrats can be partly blamed on the Americans’ failure to foster and support a working democracy through the first crucial years of the occupation.

Like it or not, the American occupiers’ work in Iraq will be only one factor in a complex of unresolved issues -- nation-building in Afghanistan, the struggle against Al Qaeda, an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, Muslim anti-Americanism from Yemen to Indonesia. Separating these tasks into discrete compartments is a bit like splitting a Rubik’s Cube. All the more reason to devote much more time to planning Iraq’s occupation and its long-term consequences for the region. Think global for a change, fellows.