March 30, 2003
THE MISSING STEP:
The Two Essential Steps Needed to Turn Iraq into a Peace-Loving Country (Jonathan Dresner, 3-31-03, History News Service)The disarmament of Iraq is our aim, we say. And surely even if there's some slippage between our public statements and true motives, reducing the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) seems like a good idea.Previous inspections for WMD in Saddam Hussein's Iraq failed because the Iraqis refused to cooperate and the inspectors were too few and too weakly supported to overcome Iraqi resistance. But even if the inspections had succeeded in the short term, a high-cost, intrusive inspection program could not have continued indefinitely.
So now we're going to try something else: regime change through conquest. Forcing out Hussein and his loyalists should allow the United States and its coalition partners to eliminate Iraq's present WMD capacity. But disarmament is difficult to sustain, even with total victory. What's necessary is the creation of a social and political aversion to weapons of mass destruction in New Iraq like that which developed in Japan after World War II.
Japan today could easily produce chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in large quantities in short order, but it has not done so. The Japanese population is deeply opposed to such weapons, owing to its unique experience as the targets of the only nuclear weapons ever used in war and to its suffering from conventional bombing. As a result, Japanese politicians have found alternative methods of defense through alliance and diplomacy.
There are two principal components to creating a WMD-averse environment, both essentially psychological: a sense of the humanity of opposing forces or neighboring populations, and confidence that one's defensive situation is not desperate. The United States fostered this attitude in Japan after 1945 by demonstrating the inhumanity of WMD, by creating a popular democratic and antiwar constitution for Japan, by committing itself to defend Japan, by supporting economic growth and by working to promote regional stabilization and democratization.
The vast majority of the Japanese public still believes that WMD -- and aggressive wars -- are unacceptable, and Japanese political leaders work hard to maintain strong diplomatic relationships with the United States and with the other Asian nations.
Both of those elements are fundamentally lacking in Iraq and have been since before the first Gulf War. This leaves us the question of whether we can replicate the dramatic turnaround of Japan in Iraq.
Every once in awhile, if you're lucky, you stumble upon a column so obtuse it glitters with a gem-like quality of near perfect unreason. Here's the Hope Diamond.
Depite having noted the unique use of WMD on Japan, Mr. Dresner then argues that: "There are two principal components to creating a WMD-averse environment, both essentially psychological: a sense of the humanity of opposing forces or neighboring populations, and confidence that one's defensive situation is not desperate." Might he not better have considered the possibility that the singular factor that made the Japanese so averse to WMD was having two nuclear weapons dropped on them, several cities quite intentionally incinerated in systematic fire bombings, and the certain knowledge that the United States would be only to happy to keep up the process idefinitely against a Japanese people who most Americans had genuinely come to think of as sub-human. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, the prospect that one's homeland will be reduced to a charnel house concentrates the mind wonderfully.
We're not suggesting this lesson need be applied to Iraq, but it's a tad disingenuous to minimize it, is it not?
Posted by Orrin Judd at March 30, 2003 10:12 PMOrrin,
Isn't that precisely the point of this article?
"The Japanese population is deeply opposed to [producing WMD]....owing to its unique experience as the targets of the only nuclear weapons ever used in war..."
Or have I missed something here?...
I agree with Barry. Unless the text is somehow not indicative of the point, Mr. Dresner is suggesting that Japan is only pacificistic now because we obliterated it into utter submission with conventional and nuclear weapons. Orrin's criticism of the article makes the same suggestion.
I have thought this myself. The issue is: can you impose your will upon a nation without utterly destroying it?
Mr. Meislin;
I think not. In the scheme of things the nuclear attacks mentioned were a small part of the devestation visited upon Japan. They were not even the deadliest single bombing raids of the war. It one of the good effects of the mythology of nuclear weapons that the Japanese consider these attacks particularly horrific.
Even there we see that it was the US security umbrella more that allowed the Japanese to avoid WMD. Now that North Korea can threaten Japan this reluctance to build WMD is fading.
He argues that "There are two principal components to creating a WMD-averse environment, both essentially psychological: a sense of the humanity of opposing forces or neighboring populations, and confidence that one's defensive situation is not desperate."
In fact, as he himself mentions but then fails to reckon with, what made Japan averse was precisely its feeling that its defensive situation was desperate.
Fellas:
I rewrote slightly to reflect your absolutely correct point, that I'd ignored his admission that having WMD used on them did contribute.
I took the point to be Iraq will not be neutralized in the long term unless the entire society experiences the true devastation of war.
President Bush has played a long slow escalation of force that has not reached its conclusion even today. First the threat "terrorists and nations who harbour them", then the diplomatic circus at the UN, then the decapitation attempt, then the bypassing of resistence in the south. Each step is ratcheting up the pressure on Saddam while sparing the population at large.
The concern here is that having taken extraordinary pains to seperate Iraqi society from the Saddam regime, that regime change will not result in a corresponding societal change as well.
Despite the mewling media's assertions otherwise, I do not think we have seen the true "Shock and Awe" yet. We have a Jacksonian War here. We start out playing by the rules. The opposition has already "cheated", and drawn advantage from doing so. However, there will come a point when it will be necessary to demonstrate to the Iraqi's that "cheating" will no longer be tolerated, but actually punished. Then the true Shock and Awe will occur. Given the US belief this war is related to national security, the retaliation may verge on a scale of Biblical proportions. Should it come down to a seige of Bagdad, then most of Iraqi society may have the misfortune to experience war in their own home as the seperation between society and regime blur in urban combat. Just as the Civil war started out quite gentlemenly, but ended with Sherman's March to the sea, it may not be any different in Iraq.
What nobody has speculated about is the US response to an Iraqi NBC attack-the ultimate "cheating" move. I would think the US would have to set a strong precedent that the use of WMD against US forces is a trip wire to nuclear retaliation. While I would hope a major city would not be destroyed, I could see tactical nuclear weapon used to send an unmistakable message.
Hopefully the lesson of Japan has not been lost, and saner heads will prevail. However, these are not Saddam's traits to date. The end game is that Saddam will be overthrown. The question is how many Coalition troops and Iraqi civilians will die to make it happen.
I think, I hope that Orrin and this guy are arguing past each other.
The Japanese can have had no high opinion of American humanity before the Occupation. Afterward, when we did not behave as they had in similar circumstances, they
had their eyes opened.
It was important, as AOG notes, that they were utterly hopeless and desolate going into the Occupation. Had they not been, they might have drawn different conclusions from our humanity, as the Germans did after 1918.
As much as I appreciate "gem-like quality", I have to respectfully disagree with your reading of my article. The point is not to repeat history, but to draw lessons from it. I'm not making an argument about what it will take to make the Iraqis surrender, but about what can be done afterwards. The only reason that Japan was able to transform its horrific experience into pacifism is that the United States gave them no reason *after the war was over* to fear war.
Posted by: Jonathan Dresner at April 2, 2003 1:01 AMP.S. If you'd read all the way to the end of the piece, you'd know that you should publicly credit the History News Service when you reprint one of their syndicated articles.
Posted by: Jonathan Dresner at April 2, 2003 4:30 AM