In rebuilding Baghdad, think of Berlin

In rebuilding Baghdad, think of Berlin

Germany wasn't rebuilt in a year, nor shall iraq

By Gil Troy
Montreal Gazette
April 4, 2004

It is generally recognized that America's military triumph brought, as one observer noted, "absolute ruin ... old men, old women, young women, children from tots to teens carrying packs, pushing carts, pulling carts, evidently ejected by the conquerors and carrying what they could of their belongings to no where in particular."

The looting following the U.S. bombardment only intensified the misery. Contemplating the devastation in Germany, 1945 - not Iraq, 2003 - months after Berlin fell, President Harry Truman remarked, "What a pity that the human animal is not able to put his moral thinking into practice! I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries."

Ours is an age of instant history. The perpetual, 24/7 news cycle bombards us with dramatic pronouncements and quick verdicts - even before events have finished. Yet the more complicated a historical process might be, the more time it needs to gel. Most lasting historical changes take hold with slow-acting cement rather than with instant crazy glue. That is why, even after a year, the hasty announcements of both victory and defeat in Iraq are ill-advised and premature.

Reconstruction sounds benign and progressive but it is almost always messy and nasty. The "occupiers" and the natives seeking to wrench Germany and Japan from their ugly pasts in the 1940s were lucky that there was no CNN to cover each misstep, every policy clash, all the chaos and the suffering - which lasted for years. Contrary to our nostalgia-tinged recollections of postwar Germany, Truman in 1945 noted that the Soviets had exacted "retribution to the nth degree."

There were purges throughout Europe as collaborators in hated regimes were removed, often forcibly. The much-vaunted "denazification" process in Germany petered out relatively quickly but the great German economic miracle - like the great Japanese recovery -- took years to nurture.

Historian David Reynolds reports that in Germany "the days of ruin, famine and barter" lasted at least until 1947, and in 1950 - five years after the war - unemployment was still in the double digits, while two-thirds of German households "had no living room and less than half had access to a bath."

In Japan, the situation was so unstable that amid a sustained campaign of strikes, protests and industrial sabotage - what we would call (low-level) terrorism - the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned Truman that if Japan succumbed to Communism, "Russia would gain, thereby, an additional war-making potential equal to 25 per cent of her capacity." The spectre of China - which had already fallen to the Communists - haunted America's Asia experts.

Conflicts regarding how to proceed compounded the challenges of pacifying, purging, rebuilding, and re-educating. In 1947, American policy-planners were still weighing the risks of rebuilding Germany and Japan as either industrial or military powers. Former secretary of the treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr,. wanted to see Germany deindustrialized; former president Herbert Hoover wrote a special report envisioning a rebuilt Germany as the economic engine of a prospering and free Europe.

The division of Germany into American, British, French and Russian occupation zones fed the chaos. Even the three non-Communist allies clashed. In 1949, as the U.S. State Department followed the Hoover recommendations unofficially, the Allies mollified the French by dismantling the Hermann Goerling steel works, eliminating 3,000 desperately-needed jobs.

With the policy-makers' penchant for fighting the last war, Americans and their allies debated how to avoid the mistakes of the First World War - the "war to end all wars" that led to a bigger war, partially because of the lingering resentments over the way the war ended.

Americans struggled with another "reconstruction" burden as well - the mythology and pathology of the post-Civil War South. In the 1940s, most Northerners and Southerners believed that the Reconstruction of the 1860s and 1870s had been harsh - when it was actually benign. Southerners hailed the end of Reconstruction - 12 years after hostilities ended in 1865 -- as "redemption." Only after the civil-rights movement of the 1960s emphasized all the progress the South failed to make during that period would a new understanding of the period emerge. Some historians now believe that the North did not uproot enough of the Southern power structure. This magnanimity toward the former slave-owners imposed years of injustice on the freed slaves, who were soon oppressed by the racist Jim Crow system of segregation that developed.

Herein, the great irony of America's reconstruction track record becomes clear. The Southern reconstruction, although quite benign, was remembered as being unduly harsh; the German and Japanese reconstructions, while quite harsh and occasionally violent, were remembered as relatively benign. Both should serve as cautionary tales. Defeating an army is hard enough; reconstructing a defeated society can take decades. Success - or failure - in Iraq will take years to achieve - and possibly even longer to recognize.

Meanwhile, as we mark not just the anniversary of the start of the war, but the anniversary of all the dire warnings about how difficult it would be to subdue Sadaam, it is important to appreciate some of this year's accomplishments.

One year ago, 25 million Iraqis lived under a cruel dictatorship that had gassed its own people, invaded its neighbours, fomented terrorism, hosted terrorists and developed all kinds of weaponry. One year ago, Libya was building its nuclear program, Pakistan was exporting nuclear know-how to rogue regimes and the immoral mullahs of Iran slept comfortably, with nary a worry about being forced to rein in their Armgaddedon-like ambitions.

While acknowledging the missteps, the shortcomings, the continued hard work that remains, it behooves us to toast the coalition forces, to salute President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and to say that, thanks to these brave souls, the world is safer today than it was a year ago.

Gil Troy teaches history at McGill University.

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