by John Kearney
KEARNEY
OCCUPATIONS
RW-B1
NARRATION: Return to exactly a year ago, just before the war in Iraq. Diplomatic and front-porch disputes had turned to the question of what postwar Iraq would hold -- for Iraqis, for the Middle East, and the world at large. President Bush offered a specific historical analogy:
TAPE: BUSH: There was a time when many said the cultures of Japan and Germany were incapable of sustaining democratic values. Well, they were wrong. Some say the same of Iraq today. They are mistaken. [applause]
NARRATION: President Bush was making one of the first of repeated administration linkages of postwar Iraq and postwar Japan and Germany. After the second world war, Japan and Germany accepted an unconditional surrender. The subsequent American military occupations helped create prosperous Japanese and German democracies, that continue to this day.
This much is undisputed. But some historians argue that the administration's historical analogies are strained. MIT professor of modern Japanese history John Dower recently participated in a forum on American occupations at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs:
TAPE: DOWER: The administration--they tend to use history the way a drunk uses a lamppost--which is for support, rather than illumination.
NARRATION: John Dower won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for "Embracing Defeat," his account of the American occupation of Japan from 1945 until 1952.
Dower itemized some of the differences between postwar Japan and Iraq: The Japanese population was homogeneous, while Iraq has pronounced communal divisions; the Japanese emperor and central bureaucracy was kept in place, while Iraq's state was completely dismantled. Dower is especially troubled by the differences in the economic plans of the occupations.
TAPE: DOWER: We didn't see in Germany, and certainly didn't see in Japan the concept that democracy is to be equated with extreme privatization and free-market ideology. This has led to real problems of credibility and legitimacy in Iraq that have compounded the already complex problems of an ill-conceived war and occupation.
NARRATION: War and occupation are not strangers to the Middle East. Beginning with Napoleon's ill-fated Egyptian campaign of 1798, European powers attempted to colonize or control Arab lands through the latter half of the twentieth century.
TAPE: KHALIDI: This reality of resistance to foreign occupation is one that is very deeply ingrained in the Middle East.
NARRATION: Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University professor of Middle East history:
TAPE: KHALIDI: Libya in 1911; Morocco in 1925; Syria in 1925; Palestine in 1936. These are all instances of in some cases quite ferocious, in some cases quite prolonged resistance to occupation.
NARRATION: The discussion inevitably led to the question of whether any invocation of history to justify current policy is valid or useful.
TAPE: ARMSTRONG: The bigger question perhaps to look at is: Why we use these analogies at all?
NARRATION: Columbia professor of East Asian history Charles Armstrong.
TAPE: ARMSTRONG: Why do these questions come up? After all, history never repeats itself; although, someone said, it rhymes. But people do want to look at historical parallels for lessons for ways of explaining what we find ourselves in today.
NARRATION: A Columbia post-doctoral fellow from Greece named Katya Papayanni attended the forum. She questioned how different parties can use history to arrive at opposing conclusions:
TAPE: PAPAYANNI: If you go to Greece, people will be more likely to believe in the analogy of Vietnam as opposed to the analogy of Japan. In Greece the media is very much, and the public, against the war. So they wouldn't believe the outcome of this occupation will be something positive as in Japan and Germany.
NARRATION: But for Columbia's Rashid Khalidi, there are useful analogies, and there are misleading analogies. The trick is knowing the difference.
TAPE: KHALIDI: You have to actually look at concrete situations. Look at what the United States did in Latin America long before it was a world power, look at what the United States has done as a world power--some of it good, some of it bad.
NARRATION: Decades from now, historians may still be debating whether the United States' current overseas adventures are good, bad, or something in between. Perhaps they'll throw in a historical analogy or two.
For Columbia Radio News, this is John Kearney.
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