Rebuilding Iraq

Rebuilding Iraq requires us to stay the course
City Editorial
July 22, 2003

We Americans are so used to our instant society that it is just getting under our collars how long it's been taking to reform Iraq. C'mon, already, we're thinking ?- it's been a whole five months!

Guests on talk shows speak of little else but how we can't get our act together in Iraq, about how we had a great war plan but no occupation plan. Poor Paul Bremer had to leave his job as the administrator in Iraq temporarily to come back across the pond and reassure the American people that progress is being made.

And it certainly does not go down well that U.S. soldiers are dying in Iraq every day.

Remember back to March 20, the day the war began? Remember when an overwhelming majority of Americans were in favor of going to war with Iraq? Remember when President Bush's approval rating was through the roof because he was leading the charge?

Remember? Anyone out there remember?

War is a serious and complicated business. It takes a long time to wage war in most cases. The Gulf War was a nice, tidy, quick war, and many Americans today use it as a model for armed conflict everywhere.

But war is usually long and messy, and yes, people get killed.

The question we have to ask ourselves is have the principles that caused us to be pro-war just a few months ago changed? Uranium or no uranium, did we think Saddam Hussein was a threat to our security or not?

In the proverbial water glass that's either half full or half empty depending on one's perspective, here's what we know about Iraq right now.

The lights are back on. Experts in every walk of life are in Iraq, either replacing or creating a way of life for a society that the Red Cross said in 1999 was deteriorating in alarming ways.

Some people in the major towns are really upset we're there. Some remnants of Saddam's Republican Guard or other insurgents are still taking shots at U.S. soldiers, and some of them are finding their target.

But really the only course for the United States right now is to stay the course. Building a democracy in an unstable and unfriendly part of the world will be worth the effort.
nashvillecitypaper.com

"It's been an unbelievable opportunity for me, for this district to be able to see just how difficult it is to pick up the pieces. Our troops are having to maintain themselves under very difficult circumstances."

from: Alabama's Role in Rebuilding Iraq

...
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.
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Occupying Iraq: The lessons of history