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Occupied with the occupation

My frequent interlocutor, Roger Gathman, is not impressed with the conduct of the occupation of Iraq. A recent post of his (Wednesday, April 28, 2004) provides a good jumping-off point to consider some issues related to the occupation.

"... It wasn’t that the occupation wasn’t planned well – the problem was that it wasn’t imagined well. Or even at all. Its planners had not only never served in uniform – for all of their constant analogizing to Japan and Germany, they apparently never asked a WWII vet what it was really like."

(There follows a long and colorful excerpt from the diary of a WWII correspondent, detailing the occupation-chaos of Italy - including the humorous observation that "everybody fucks constantly ...
The latter might not be happening now in Iraq – alas, our journalists are much more hidebound about such things than the journalists of yore.")

I wonder what the basis is for the frequent assertion that American war planners failed to excercise their imaginations sufficiently - is it that things aren't going well at present? But that's not sufficient to conclude to a lack of careful planning and imagining; there might be too many variables to consider - all of the possible combinations would elude any conceivable deliberative process.

One might say that specific avoidable errors, made in WWII, have been repeated in Iraq; e.g., tolerating looting (as was done in Italy, and elsewhere). But maybe the tolerance of looting wasn't a mistake then or now - maybe it was the least bad option; or maybe it was now and not then, or vice versa.

Did the occupiers in WWII, prior to spearheading the occupations, themselves imagine well (or at all) the contours and exigencies of the "occupation dynamic"? Is that the lesson - that they did not, and hence we don't want to imitate them - or is the lesson that they managed a difficult situation well, all things considered, and we ought to generalize and abstract from their experience a guideline of sorts for action?

A certain strain of criticism of the occupation seems to treat the population of Iraq as a kind of lumpenproletariat, beyond blame, and eternally empathized with as to its antipathy to the alien occupier. But prescinding from the question of blame, surely the "human element" in any social situation entails a hugely indeterminate factor; especially when a society has been harrowed by years of totalitarianism, many pressures long stifled will erupt - and hence the hapless occupier will have to improvise and marshall ad hoc measures to contend with multitudinous social paroxysms.

I don't deny that mistakes have been - and are being - made in the course of the occupation. But even in speaking of "mistakes," care needs to be taken in distinguishing between those that are judged as much with the benefit of hindsight, and those about which it is claimed that a certain dire outcome could and ought to have been foreseen in advance.

Roger concludes with,

"One of the reason those New Deal occupations were more successful than this failed effort was that the men in charge had had enough of the self-righteousness cut out of them by the Depression that they could actually listen. No such luck with our contemporary crew, who have gorged like pigs on their own p.r."

The time factor inherent in declaring the occupation "failed" is an interesting one; the example given of Italy in 1944 would have led one to conclude, at that moment in time, that the occupation had "failed." Germany, in, say, 1946 might have inspired the same conclusion. As the cliche says - it's not over 'til it's over; the challenge is determining with any certainty when it's over. Whenever "it's over" for Iraq, surely there's a way to go, yet.

April 29, 2004 | Permalink

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Comments

Paul, hmm, where to start.
1. Historical analogies. When I reflect on my past, scanning for previous situations that will give me a clue for current, problematic situations, what am I doing? I am looking for behaviors that were successful or unsuccessful, for one. For another, I am trying to get a macro view in order to decide if my behavior is rational, or simply the result of some unconscious compulsion. In other words, the analogies I am looking for are therapeutic, and concerned with process. But if I am scanning my past for analogies to reassure myself about outcomes, I am succumbing to compulsion instead of understanding it.
Similarly, when American policymakers look at occupations in Germany and Italy, what should they be doing? They shouldn't be saying, well, look, everything came out all right there -- they should be saying, what did we do as occupying powers?
2. Analogy is necessary, in the first place, because we have never occupied Iraq. But the brainlessness of the pre-conflict planning is revealed, for me, in two things:

Posted by: roger at Apr 30, 2004 5:52:41 PM

1. That analogies were scanned, not for concrete information, but as bedtime tales about fantasized successes; and
2. that where analogy was not necessary -- where we could talk, in fact, of the historic and real relations between the U.S. and Iraq -- the planners were clueless.
Case in point: the much vaunted planning for "humanitarian' relief in Iraq. This is often pointed to by war supporters as some kind of good thing. In reality, it points to incoherence at the Pentagon's highest levels. The humanitarian crisis in the Gulf War I was caused by Saddam Hussein's army deploying directly against the Shiites and the Kurds. The Pentagon's whole point, in occupying Iraq, was to destroy Saddam's army -- and hence remove the cause of the humanitarian crisis. So planning for it was, shall we say, an exercise in the higher irrelevance. Then they pat themselves on the back for this -- for all the world like people who have made a desert and congratulate themselves on their expertise in flood control. It is too laugh -- until our tears turn into blood.

Meanwhile, we have the chief of the Joint Chief of Staffs laughed at because he knew that an occupying force that wanted to prevent, say, the massive looting of copper wire had to have the numbers to do it, and had to be prepared to meet it in innovative ways. Instead, we had no numbers. In effect, Rumsfeld et al. called upon the analogy with Germany and then paid no attention to the content of the analogy. For them, it was so much political rhetoric. Alas, for the Iraqis and the American troops, it was a fatal and stupid error. The hubris of this crowd is unbelievable -- as is their evident incapacity to understand their own arguments.
Which, you know, is evidence of compulsion, not rationality.

Posted by: roger at Apr 30, 2004 6:03:14 PM

Roger,

Thanks for your remarks.

The nearest factor I was able to identify that you seem to hold as evidence of a lack of "imagination" by the war planners was the oft-sighted troop numbers. You seem to treat troops in greater quantity than have been in Iraq as a necessary, but insufficient condition, for preventing the looting (insufficient because you also adverted to the need for innovation).

Firstly, I have yet to read a convincing case that the current troop levels literally could not have prevented looting, had they so chosen - though the means employed would have been brutal.

Secondly, the question still deserves to be addressed seriously whether the looting ought to have been prevented, all things considered. (After all, however much it might have mitigated the outcome of the European reconstructions in WWII, the looting then did not prevent arguably successful occupations from being realized).

Now, there's another comparison pre-war planners might have made - and which you seem to have ignored: the occupation of Japan.

Recently, I read a short interview in the NYT with a historian whose specialty is Japan in the modern era, and he remarked that the Japanese welcomed the American occupation, and there wasn't a single counter-occupation attack - "terrorist" or otherwise - over the course of the American military's presence there.

I would guess on your reckoning, it was at best naive, or at worst brazenly hubristic for the war planners vis-a-vis Iraq to have supposed that by and large the Iraqis would have greeted the Americans similarly, as liberators-occupiers-rebuilders.

Any more hubristic, though, than supposing that a country whose major cities were fire-bombed and/or devastated in unprecdented attacks that explicitly targeted civilians - gigantic acts of "terror," if you like - would welcome a former enemy as a partner for reconstituting the nation?

One could then fall into endless discussion about the Japanese psyche vs. the Arab/Middle-Eastern ethos, climate of world opinion then vs. now, &c., and come away chastened as to the limits of historical analogies; one is reminded, then, of the risks inherent in overdrawing comparisons between Iraq and the European reconstruction-occupations.

Another article from the NYT, some time back, detailed the improvisatory nature of the European occupations - how in response to emergent factors and exigencies, as new data were collated (and surely in light of extant political considerations) strategies and tactics were adapted or simply changed.

You may not intend this, but I often get the sense from your critiques of the CPA that there is only one entity possessed of true agency in Iraq at the moment - the CPA. Only it has efficacy, only it is responsible for anything that occurs, especially anything goes wrong (or, maybe it + Chalabi and his INC). The upshot of this is a kind of genetic fallacy: since on your reckoning the Pentagon had it wrong from the beginning, it can now never do anything right.

So I'll ask you outright: do you agree that reconstructing - instutionally, spiritually-sentimentally-pyschologically, and materially - a nation is potentially a fool's errand, and the advent of new facts on the ground can entail a need to alter ends and means?

I don't see how anyone could deny that; but to admit it should entail a chastening of expectations - and criticism.

Posted by: Paul Craddick at May 2, 2004 9:15:16 PM