Marking a man's passage into intellectual oblivion set off a friendly debate on the nature of American postwar occupations. In simple terms, how do Occupied Germany and Occupied Japan — the two most ambitious and successful democratic redemptions in history — compare to that of Iraq?
Germany and Japan fell militarily silent relatively quickly. As was posted on a weblog eighteen months ago, a few Nazi gangs caused a bit of local chaos but most forces surrendered when ordered; Japan stopped on a dime. Early postwar years were difficult, Japan's especially bleak and crime-ridden — both were targeted by Moscow's political subterfuge, Japan particularly. Neither experienced the gangster-terrorist enemy like the kind that chose to commit itself to liberated Iraq. Saddam Hussein's conscripted armies dispersed, many soldiers refusing to fight; surviving loyalists collapsed or fled to regroup as mostly faceless criminals and saboteurs. If a mistake was committed by Iraq's American-led liberators, it was to expect what Allied armies two generations before received from the totalitarian regimes responsible for dozens of conquests and millions dead: unconditional and objective surrender. Overestimating the humanity of our enemies, the Near East authoritarians, was a natural and even laudable failure, the hallmark of free societies. The Nazis and the militarists, terrible as they were, possessed an ultimate humility — a mark of man — that the terrorists lack.
And yet for their animalism and destruction, this enemy has been met by Western technology and moral clarity; and the Iraqi character, resilient and centered after decades of undressed modern tyranny, viscerally inked in a recently published Iraqi political cartoon. A West German constitution was promulgated in May, 1949; Supreme Commander of Allied Powers Douglas MacArthur presented his to Tokyo in 1946, the document promulgated that November. Iraqis should ratify their constitution by 2006, three years after liberation. The San Francisco Peace Treaty was signed between Japan and the United States in September, 1951 and Allied occupation of Japan officially ended in April, 1952. West Germany was granted sovereignty in October, 1954. Sovereignty was given to Iraqis in late June of 2004, legally ending a one-year occupation; two years after the deposition of Saddam Hussein, an elected government took office.
Two threads run between democratization sixty years ago and today: given the opportunity under the aegis of free nations, good men will choose liberty; and that strongmen will conspire to undermine that construction, whenever and wherever and however possible.