Opinion Editorials, November 2003, www.aljazeerah.info
Human Price of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine
Israeli daily aggression on the Palestinian people
Mission and meaning of Al-Jazeerah
Cities, localities, and tourist attractions
Iraq Is Not Post War Germany
John Anast*
Al-Jazeerah, 11/9/03
I do not understand why people continue to attempt to make comparisons between WWII and Iraq (See note below). The two have little in common. At the start of WWII America was an innocent nation, comprised of a people drawn to duty by the heinous attack by Japanese forces in the Pacific. The sacrifices made by the average American during that era were well beyond what this generation of Americans might be able to understand or accept. In Iraq the US is the aggressor, based upon a hypothetical threat which Iraq never made and had no capacity to implement. Modern warfare as horrific as it may be, cannot compare to the storming of the beaches at Normandy or Iwo Jima. We fight modern wars with a certainty of outcome. It's the peace component we seem to have trouble with. Iraq cannot be compared to Germany or Japan, or for that matter, the Iraqi people cannot be compared to either the German or the Japanese people, respectively.
Germany was a predominantly Christian nation, whose people suffered tremendous hardships over the years of WWII, including the scars of WWI. The Japanese were and are an extremely proud and dedicated people who maintained an almost fanatic reverence for their Emperor (a slight comparison perhaps to Islamic reverence to the Mullahs). The Emperor survived WWII and offered leadership to the Japanese people not seen as corrupted by the American occupation. The will of both the Germans and Japanese was broken by the US and its allies over the course of the war years. In order to pacify the Japanese the US resorted to a nuclear attack on two Japanese cities instead of an invasion of their homeland. The Iraq combat campaign lasted for perhaps a matter of weeks by some estimates before the cohesion of Iraqi military resistance crumbled. Germany and Japan both had a huge military industrial complex which was easily converted to civilian use and employment. In Germany the task was more difficult given the devastation reeked upon it by the Allied powers. But both economies had the necessary history, experience, technology and desire to implement strategies to get life back to some form of normalcy, simplified by the fact that both peoples maintained a deeply rooted secular society. In Iraq the Bush Administration is attempting to create something that had not heretofore existed. Iraq's secularism suppressed the deeply rooted religious attitudes of the Iraqi people by brut force, threats and intimidation. So it seems that the Bush Administration is attempting to alter a culture in a way as if we are the big buana teaching the savages how to live. Could it be that their religious and cultural beliefs are satisfying and fulfilling to them, and that they have no desire to be Christianized or occupied for that matter? By the comments of some -- including at least one General, there is an attitude that our way of life and belief system is the correct one and that somehow their Islamic beliefs are flawed.
Iraq will inevitably become an Islamic nation, likely after the 2004 elections in the US, despite the efforts of CPA to prevent that democratic outcome. The paradox is that we are supposedly offering "freedom" and "self-determination" to the Iraqi people, as long as that does not translate into religious freedoms or the democratic expression thereof in the formation of a "democratic" Islamic government.
Iraq ain't in no way no how in no way shape or form comparable to WWII. It is an insult to many who served and sacrificed -- including on the home front who endured rationing and uncertainty in an uncertain period in our history -- and to the heroes who remember and endured the hardships in the field.
* I wrote an article published by the CFR (Council on Foreign Relations). It was published first on the website, the Office of Strategic Services, a society of veterans and siblings of veterans who served in the OSS during WWII.
The CFR article is "HEADLINE: That Was Then: Allen W. Dulles on the Occupation of Germany"
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python. (Alquds,10/25/03). |
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