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| Why the Iraq invasion is doomed to failure |
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by Eamonn Fingleton
3/18/2003
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Editorial page article which was published in International Herald Tribune on March 18, 2003.
TOKYO. Whatever the merits of President Bush's case for going to war, one aspect of his Iraq strategy seems badly misconstrued: his assumption that the reform of post-Saddam Iraq will run as smoothly as the U.S. Army's occupation of Japan after World War II.
It is easy to see why the Bush administration has been so beguiled by the Japanese precedent. Almost from the start, the victorious American forces were hailed as honoured guests by ordinary Japanese citizens. Meanwhile Japanese leaders could not have been more polite or attentive in listening to their new American overlords' instructions. The effect proved disarming even for U.S. occupation's vengeful supreme commander, General Douglas MacArthur. Beforehand he had announced that for the next twenty-five years "the Japanese will have a hard enough time eating." Soon after arrival, however, he professed himself convinced that the Japanese people, on the strength of a few days' contact with American GIs, had become firm admirers of "the free man's way in actual action." A year later he declared that Japan had undergone a social revolution "unparalleled" in world history.
The trouble with the Japanese precedent is that few of the conditions that made it possible apply to Iraq today. In particular whereas even in defeat Japan was an orderly nation, the same is unlikely to true of a defeated Iraq.
One key problem will be how to manage the immediate power vacuum following Saddam's departure. In this regard the contrast with Japan in 1945 could hardly be sharper. Although Japan's wartime leader General Hideki Tojo was portrayed at the time as a Saddam-like tyrant who had single-handedly bent the nation to his will, this was always a cartoonist's fiction. He was merely the first among equals in the Japanese military's collective system of responsibility. Indeed long before Japan's defeat, he gamely bowed to pressure from his peers and resigned. Not only was there no power vacuum in his wake but even when the entire military establishment was disbanded at war's end, the country immediately passed into the firm control of respected civilian bureaucratic agencies. They had been there all along and their leadership and esprit de corps provided the crucial order and rational national decision-making that saved Japan from a descent into chaos.
A further factor that helped was that MacArthur retained Emperor Hirohito as the "symbol" of the state. This decision has always been controversial in the West but, for a broken and humiliated nation, it had the great benefit of providing continuity.
All this contrasts markedly with what the Americans are likely to face in Iraq. Any tradition of orderly government Iraq ever enjoyed has long since been destroyed by Saddam Hussein. As he seems to have eliminated all capable potential successors, there seems to be no one available even to begin to rebuild such a tradition.
Moreover, the chances of an orderly transition are likely to be further stymied by the fractious nature of the Iraqi population. In contrast with the Japanese, who are famously homogeneous and are trained from birth to pull together in a crisis, Iraq is divided among mutually antagonistic groups of Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites. Even in the unlikely event that they will forbear from settling old scores among themselves, their mutual jealousies will make it difficult to work together in restoring order to a devastated nation.
At the end of the day, the basic reason why the U.S. occupation of Japan went so well was because Japanese leaders wanted it to go well. They knew that the smoother their relations with the Americans, the sooner the occupation would end. Although they did not always obey the Americans' instructions (in reality they found many ways to frustrate the Americans' intentions), they at all times saw it as a matter of enlightened self-interest to appear as cooperative as possible. In effect the Japanese played the role of model prisoner, gracefully putting up with many indignities the sooner to regain his freedom.
For people to behave like this requires a sense of far-sighted discipline that few nations in defeat have ever shown. On the face of it, post-war Iraq will lack even the most basic decision-making structures necessary to enforce such discipline.
Eamonn Fingleton is the author most recently of In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity (Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
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