Insights into the New World Disorder: (Iraq War vs. Occupation of Japan)

[Lydia Leftcoast]

Comments by Karel van Wolferen, part of which offer some interesting insights about "the war on Terror" and "nation building."
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What is happening in Iraq is not sufficiently understood. A state has been destroyed, a state with all the things that made a state work: police protection against crime, infrastructure, electricity, schooling, medical facilities; everything that allows a society to function, even though under Saddam Hussein it was a tyranny. That state is no longer there! The discussion about the so-called civil war in Iraq among antiwar people conveys a degree of ignorance that is horrendous. I'm talking here about people whose heart is in the right place and who are horrified about what this war of choice has done to the U.S., but they share in the general American ignorance of the fact that in Iraq you have a vacuum. This has caused private security militias to emerge, and yes, it so happens that members of these militias identify very intensely with their Sunni or Shiite backgrounds and so turn against each other. Don't talk about civil war or the ingratitude of the Iraqis who have an opportunity for democracy and don't take it. What do you mean democratic opportunity? Where are the institutions? As if you can deliver democracy by FedEx or something. All that commentary reveals plain and unforgivable ignorance.

There is so much ignorance among educated people about how civil institutions are supposed to function, and ignorance of what a true civil war normally entails, that the unleashing of civil war has become the central criticism. What we essentially have in Iraq are groups that have turned against an invader. You can't actually speak of occupation either because the U.S. doesn't have the means of an occupier at its disposal; it squats and has no control over the country whatsoever. Amid these very heavily armored squatters who earlier destroyed the Iraqi state, the militias fight everyone they see as a future threat to themselves, since they know themselves to be unprotected by law, by a functioning state.

What about the comparison with the postwar occupation of Japan, which is sometimes made in this context?

The U.S. occupation left Japanese institutions intact. Americans operated under the illusion that they were remaking Japan. But by essentially leaving the bureaucracy in place, except for the Naimusho and the emperor legitimizing the whole thing, only eliminating the armed forces, they kept all the things necessary to keep the country going. And within a very short time the Japanese were smart enough to see to what extent they could flout American purposes. It is a fraudulent comparison to begin with; Iraq did not start a war that it lost....

Read the rest of this thought-provoking article from the Japan Times at

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20070506x1.html

[aquart]

1. Yup. "Turned against an invader." Yup. Yup. Yup.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. And he points out that the formation of militias is inevitable

when all the institutions of civil society have been destroyed.

[aquart]

6. We turned Iraq into Somalia.

We've always done so well in Somalia.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

7. Somalia may even be better off at this point

because they don't seem to have daily car bombings.

[neverforget]

3. Not to mention that Japan surrendered unconditionally so they laid

down their arms and that was it. Iraq is a totally different war that was started illegally and no surrender. The war never ended but the war of occupation persists.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. And as van Wolferen mentions in the article,

the U.S. left Japanese civil society intact. According to Naomi Wolf's September 2004 article in Harper's, the U.S. fired something like half a million Iraqi civil servants and tried to privatize everything.

Furthermore, the U.S. occupation was led by New Deal types who truly believed in democracy and populism, not by the types of privatizers and profiteers who are running the war in Iraq.

[Karenina]

5. This is EXCELLENT information, LL!!!

:loveya: K&R!!!

[Karenina]

8. Sunday kick!

:kick: