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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. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
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