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Now that coalition forces are gaining control of Baghdad, much of our public attention has moved from military matters to civil concerns there -- the Bush administration's desire to make Iraq a stable, democratic nation with a decent standard of living that includes education and health care.
Indeed, there was much discussion of this even before the shooting started. Fortunately, the United States is familiar with the process of converting conquered territory. Unfortunately, the national record is not one of unqualified success.
Of course there are bright spots, like Japan. American forces occupied the country after it surrendered in 1945, and Gen. Douglas MacArthur pretty much ran the place for a few years.
MacArthur was, and still is, greatly admired by American right-thinkers, but that's probably because they never looked at his record as the most progressive military dictator known to history. He insisted that Japanese workers be represented by powerful, effective unions. The new constitution gave Japanese women full civil rights. Large estates were broken up so that small farmers could own they land they tilled.
Church and state were firmly separated. Political
prisoners -- socialists and communists among them -- were
freed and encouraged to participate in government. Freedoms
of press and speech were guaranteed. The old government had
been so puritanical that kissing scenes were forbidden from
movies, and films about personal happiness
were
banned; that changed quickly after the Americans took
charge.
Call that one a success, Germany was another, although
Gen. Lucius Clay, who was in charge there, is nowise as
famous as MacArthur. Denazification
meant
overhauling the educational system and attempting to remove
the martial streak from the German psyche so that the
nation would no longer attempt to be a military power, but
would instead be a peace-loving democracy.
We did that so well that there was much consternation in Washington last fall when German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder got re-elected; one of his major campaign planks was his opposition to a military invasion of Iraq. The Germans became just too much of a peace-loving democracy to suit President Bush.
The German program did take a lot longer than
anticipated. As victory looked certain in the spring of
1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked how long
American troops might have to be stationed in Germany. A
year, two years at the most,
FDR replied. We're going
on 58 years now of keeping soldiers in Germany.
But no operation goes exactly as planned, and there are some dismal failures lurking in our history.
There was, for instance, the Reconstruction
of
the defeated South after the Civil War, with the South
under military occupation while well-meaning Yankee
school-teachers and missionaries tried to change hearts and
minds.
They were met almost immediately with a violent terrorist resistance movement known as the Ku Klux Klan. After the troops were withdrawn in 1877 to give the South a chance to govern itself, states quickly moved to disenfranchise their black citizens, and state governments winked at lynchings, whippings, burnings and the like.
Federal troops had to be sent back to the old Confederacy in the 1950s and 1960s. The Confederate battle flag still waves proudly in parts of Dixie. Election returns from Florida take days or weeks, and no one is sure whether they can be trusted to produce an honest count.
Nor is this confined to the nether side of the
Mason-Dixon Line. Michael Lind, a scholar of such matters,
has just published an entire book about George W. Bush
and the Southern Takeover of American Politics,
wherein
he points out that some of the least attractive aspects of
southern culture -- crony capitalism instead of competitive
markets, for instance, or weakening the separation between
church and state -- have become part of the national
polity.
In other words, the Reconstruction of the American South was a miserable failure, and now we Yankees are being governed by Confederates.
And if we go further back in American history, the results are not encouraging, either. I live in territory that was conquered during the Mexican War of 1846-48, and it's still pretty much a colony. Decisions about whether we will have rail service or broadband internet connections, how local forests and rivers will be managed -- they're all made somewhere else. As Daniel Kemmis has observed, nobody that matters thinks the rural West can be trusted to govern itself.
But who knows? If the Bush administration is able to install universal health care and a first-rate educational system in Iraq, it might happen here, too.
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