What Will They Think in 60 Years?
Very sorry, Andrei, for the delay. I only just picked my jaw up off the table from last night. Apropos of which, I was most intrigued by your account, on pages 453-456, of Tom Dewey's calm acceptance of Harry Truman's stunning upset victory in the 1948 election. As you note, just 25,000 more votes for Dewey from the right places would have sent the thing to the House of Representatives. And yet there was Mr. Prosecutor, the day after this heartbreaking defeat (his second, of course), taking matters with equanimity and agreeing that it was "most essential" that America continue to pursue a bipartisan foreign policy. What a model for certain people to follow.
Now, let's get down to business. I'll begin by adding to the encomiums from others. The book is really a terrific piece of work in every way. The research is thorough, the narrative thread is powerful, and the writing! Gore underused you is all I can say. This book would make a great capstone to a career, worthy of mention in the first paragraph of your (far-off) New York Times obit. Not that you won't top it. But it's that good. I recommend it highly to readers of this thread.
But I'm interested in nudging this conversation farther along down the usable past road toward the present day. The basic question here, inevitably, starts with Iraq. In your first post, Andrei, you wrote, after noting present-day Berliners' attachment to the central Berlin airport where the US planes delivering goods to the city landed: "I still can't help but wonder whether the residents of Baghdad will - sixty years from now - be campaigning to keep an American army base open because of their gratitude for the American occupation. So I'd like to kick off this conversation by asking whether that is a fair comparison."
No one seems to have answered you directly, so I will. No! Or, more fully: It's not a fair comparison yet, anyway, and I find it pretty difficult to imagine America pulling off the circumstances that would render it a fair comparison.
Yes, we bombed Berlin to kingdom come, sorta kinda like we bombed Baghdad. And then we helped rebuild Berlin, sorta kinda like we're allegedly doing in Baghdad now. But I would say that we are some long distance away from getting to the point in Baghdad that we'd reached in Berlin by, say, June 1948, when the Soviet blockade started--our soldiers weren't being attacked, insurgents weren't laying IEDs, etc etc.
Which is to say, in Berlin in 1948, we genuinely were seen as liberators, while in Baghdad today, we're not even close to being seen like that (perhaps one or two of our respondents will disagree with that?). What would it take for that to happen? I'm not a reconstruction expert, just a generalist journalist who's read some history, but it strikes me that the United States is two or three years, anyway, away from being seen in even a somewhat benign light by a large majority of the Iraqi civilian population. In a recent ABC/BBC poll from March, 72 percent of Iraqis either "strongly" or "somewhat" oppose the presence of coalition forces in their country, and 53 percent say the surge hasn't improved security in the areas where it's taken root. So we're in pretty bad shape.
But this is only the beginning of the counter-argument. There's also a political point to be made here, which is, of course, that it's highly unlikely that the United States has (or should have) the political will that would be required to take the time to get to the point where we would be seen largely favorably. If the presidential candidate you and I both prefer wins the election, it seems very clear to me that we won't be sticking around in large numbers for a very long time (that candidate will not, in my view, be able to manage as quick and total a withdrawal as either he promises or many of his adherents wish, but I think it's fair to say that he also has no interest in seeing substantial US forces in Iraq by the time, say, he seeks reelection).
So in other words, when you wonder whether Baghdadis will value us 60 years from now, I have to say that I fear we're well past the point where that's possible. And in domestic political terms, we're probably well past the point where it's even desirable, because the only candidate who's talking about staying there long enough for that outcome to have an outside chance of obtaining is the candidate you and I both want to see lose. So I wonder how you respond to all this.
The foregoing is not to say that there aren't useful lessons for now in your book, and I will, despite my tardiness, write one more entry tomorrow addressing some of those.
With thanks, Michael Tomasky.
I found myself very perplexed by Cherny's question. It's not so much that I had any visceral feelings about the correct answer to the question. It's that I couldn't quite figure out what the question was, and had trouble even conceiving of the sort of circumstance Cherny seemed to want us to consider.
The hypothetical scenario is supposed to include the possibility that sixty years from now there will still be operational US military bases in Iraq. We're also being asked to imagine that many Iraqis might want these bases to stay where they are, and that because of their gratitude for the continued American presence in Iraq. Cherny asks us to consider that the Iraqis might be actually grateful for the American "occupation". But does that mean we're really supposed to imagine a situation in which the US maintains an outright military occupation of Iraq for sixty years? Or is he only imagining that we consider a few years of occupation transitioning to some other lower key military presence, as happened in Germany. I'll assume it's the latter, for the sake of realism.
Now in the case of Germany, I imagine that there are some Germans who are so happy the Americans got rid of Hitler that they are even grateful to us for flattening large portions of their country and killing many of their relatives in order to do it. But for those Germans who are also grateful for the subsequent sustained US military presence in their country for six decades, their gratitude obviously has to do with the fact that they perceived that presence as providing a security umbrella that helped protect them from a worrisome enemy, the Soviet Union. If there had been no one from whom they needed protection, I am quite sure that very few Germans would have wanted the military forces of a foreign power to hang around inside their country for sixty years.
So, presumably, Cherny's hypothetical future Iraqis would likewise only be happy for sixty years of US military presence, and lobby to keep us and our basses there, if they saw those bases and presence as protecting them from something. What is that? What is it that we are supposed to be imagining here?
Are we to imagine that we have been protecting Iraqis from Iran? That hardly seems likely, given that Iran and Iraq seem poised now to enter a period of relatively good relations. If the US is squared off against Iran in the region for sixty years, with Iraq as the base of operations, Iraqis are likely to consider their plight as a case of being caught unnecessarily in the crossfire between a distant imperial power and a neighbor with whom they would otherwise have had normal relations. Hardly a case for gratitude.
Are we to imagine then that we've been protecting the Iraqis domestically from various kinds of terrorists, saboteurs and insurrectionists? Well, surely if the ultimate consequence of the American invasion is sixty years of violent civil strife, the Iraqis are most likely to view the Iraq war as the start of some sort of barbarous dark age, and the invasion of the American occupiers as the proximate cause of that dark age. We would be even more reviled than we are now.
Are we to imagine, then, that we have been protecting the Iraqis from some other kind of foreign expansionism, like the Chinese for example? That doesn't seem realistic. No matter how China develops over the next few decades it is hard to imagine now how it could possibly turn out that 2003 will be seen as the dawn of the age of aggressive Chinese expansion into the Middle East, an agenda which would have succeeded if the Americans had not been there to stop them. A fantastical concept.
But then, if there is nothing that we are to imagine ourselves as protecting the Iraqis from for sixty years, what possible reason could we imagine them to have for feeling grateful for 60 years of foreign intrusion?
I'm guessing that what Cherny has in mind is that these future Iraqis might be grateful, not for the protection from nothing, but simply because they look back on the US invasion as the day the United States began to pump its treasury into Iraq. That is, we are to imagine that we spend sixty years dropping sky candy, and every other kind of candy, on Iraq in the new al-Plan al-Marshall, and that the Iraqis sixty years from now are rich beyond their wildest dreams. We imagine that we have just militarily rented Iraq from the Iraqis, not to protect them, but to pursue our own geopolitical interests, and that the Iraqis are nevertheless successfully bought off by our largess. And we imagine that the largess is so large that Iraqis still don't want us to leave sixty years from now. Is that it?
Cherny seems confused about the reality of the US mission in Iraq, and its geopolitical purpose, and how little that mission has ever had to do with the interests of Iraqis. We invaded Germany because it was a dire threat, and then hung around there to protect ourselves and the Germans from a new common threat. But we invaded Iraq only because we wanted a Middle East foothold somewhere, and we thought Iraq would be an easy target.
June 4, 2008 7:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Now in the case of Germany, I imagine that there are some Germans who are so happy the Americans got rid of Hitler that they are even grateful to us for flattening large portions of their country and killing many of their relatives in order to do it."
Sorry, don't know how to do block quotes.
I have some years of dealing with German attitudes about the war. You are right that Germans were happy to move beyond the old history. This is not to say that there are not segments on the right that still believe they should have won the war and gotten rid of the Jews. This has been spoken to me in the most direct way, in one instance by a policeman angry that I was taking pictures of a recent grave desecration in a small Jewish cemetery.
I lived for years in a small building and in a particular apartment that gave me the right to keep the garden. This in itself shows something about German culture. Rather than some arrangement in which the person living in the building for longest might control of the garden, at some point it had been delegated to the this apartment, probably over some dispute years back. And so it remained. Not by a sensible tradition of fairness, but by the tradition of rules and not wanting to change them. The American sense that it might be shared wouldn't have been an option in this neighborhood, its people from an older generation. Sharing without rules would have been chaos, Younger Germans are more Green when it comes to the land, and sharing would be fine.)
So, in a society that values land and rules in equal measure, my neighbors were in a difficult spot. They had been living in their apartments for generations, buildings that had been partially destroyed and rebuilt in the bombing. I lived in the one building that was left untouched. The garden was an important for several reasons. Land survives bombings and represents rebirth, And other apartments looked on to this garden from buildings without gardens.
The very fact that I lived in this apartment was an affront. It's very hard to find any apartment. So there is a natural nager when a one goes to a foreigner, and one who got the rights to control the garden !
Each morning as I went out to garden, windows would go up around me and Germans would just stare as I worked. At some point, a neighbor introduced himself. He spoke English and had been a translator at the end of the war for American troops. We got to topic of the garden. He mentioned that my nickname was "the diligent American." Typically German, it was a wry way to express anger. He told me that no one argued about my right to work the garden--Germans follow rules. But they were unhappy that I was making too many changes and too fast. In fact, the garden was completely overgrown and hadn't been taken care of for years.
I loved the garden. But as I dug in it, I began to turn up old bits of tiles, pieces of apartments (and lives) that had been destroyed in carpet bombing. I started to make a little place for the pieces. I thought it would say something important to the neighborhood. My friend told me to stop rather forcefully.
I soon stopped gardening also. The garden returned to its unkept state. And remained that way for years.
Germans understand what happened in the war. They understand that bombing is a part of war, and that Germans had been doing it first. But that can't make the emotional trauma of being bombed for those who experienced it any less severe.
But Germans are quite good at compartmentalizing. So it's not a surprise that would separate the response to bombing and the response to reconstruction of a neighborhood, or in the case of the airlift, the effort to keep them alive and free.
In relation to the book's title, I had a friend, a Jewish fellow, who had been hidden during the war. When he emerged, the first treat he had was a Hershey bar from an American soldier. In a country that makes the most delicious chocolates, he still prefers the Hershey.
June 5, 2008 8:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
Germans understand . . . that bombing is a part of war, and that Germans had been doing it first.
If by "bombing" you mean strategic bombing, then, I highly doubt that Germans would agree with either assertion.
It was after all Britain (Churchill and Bomber Harris) and not Germany which targeted civilians ("dehousing" them, a euphemism for eviscerating them, blowing off their limbs, and when lucky enough to produce a firestorm, burning them alive).
Britain and in the end, the U.S. purposefully engaged in terror-bombing in the expectation(?) of breaking the will of the civilian population and causing it to rise against its leadership. The allies continued the campaign after it became clear -- from the experience of the British civilian population -- that it wouldn't work, at which point the terror-bombing became purely punitive and/or spiteful.
Note: Cf. the Avro Lancaster, B-17, and B-24 with the Ju87 and He111.
June 5, 2008 9:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
I repeat only what I've heard from friends. When industrial centers were in cities, there wasn't much choice. The punitive bombings as you say were another matter. Generally, the Germans much prefer to talk about the behavior of the Russians rather than the Yanks.
June 5, 2008 4:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Especially, to an American -- manners, you know.
But seriously, any idea that the British were capable of bombing "industrial centers" -- they could barely hit a city and only if it was located on a river to provide a reference point -- is a myth. That's why they chose saturation bombing; precision bombing was utterly beyond them.
Authority? A.C. Grayling and Nicholson Baker, the most recent books to examine the subject, but the claim goes back to the start of the war.
June 5, 2008 10:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Not to devalue Andrei's question, but Iraq '03 and Berlin '48 present us with some pretty stark differences. For one thing, Germans in the post-war period were reeling from the incomprehensibly destructive fervor to which the bulk of the population had been roused. While Iraqis, too, had long lived under a cruel dictator, the majority of them were not party to their own destruction in the same was as the Germans. This difference is fundamental to understanding why the Germans were significantly more open to American stewardship despite the US bombing of German cities during the war, than are current-day Iraqis who do not suffer from the same traumatic self-inflicted psychological displacement. Immediately following the war, many many Germans found themselves questioning what it meant to be German, how their past would weigh on their immediate future, and on profound questions concerning the direction European civilization had been taking. Iraqis are not likely to reflect in the same way, due to the different nature of their situation, until after the American troop presence is significantly diminished. Only then will we be able to assist them in their national regeneration in the way we did in Germany - only after they have begun to take those first, fundamental steps of their own volition and not at the barrel of a gun.
June 4, 2008 7:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
You might add that while post-WWII Germans remained Germans, post-Saddam Iraqis became Sunnis, Shii, and Kurds, and Iraq turned not into Berlin but into Lebanon.
June 4, 2008 7:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
While Iraqis, too, had long lived under a cruel dictator . . . . Charles Gelman
"Too," Charles? Germans knew they were living under stupid, corrupt functionaries, but they agreed ---
"Wenn das der Führer wüßte"
June 5, 2008 6:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
So how many votes did Hillary lose the nomination by?
Where they had caucuses and primaries in the same state she received more votes in the polling booth. The caucuses are inherently biased against the candidate who has the older set of supporters.
The party is just lucky that she is not yelling the nomination was stolen as many of her supporters recognize.
June 4, 2008 9:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
You appear to have lost your way and stumbled onto the wrong thread.
June 4, 2008 9:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
The German view of America is mixed and not exactly a hundred percent pro-American, which Cherny believes to to be the case. Germans still have some misgivings towards the Americans due to the desttruction of German cities by American bombers during the Second World War. This helped to create a huge opposition in Germnay to the introduction of Pershing II missiles in the eighties and has continued with German oppostion to America's involvement in the Second Iraq War. I also believe that the German case is not very revelant toward the situation in Iraq. The most similiar example to Iraq would be Cuba after the Spainish-American War, in which the United States, like what is doing in Iraq, forced an treaty upon that country that gave the United States a say in its internal policies and forced a permanent US presence in the island. The end result was the takeover of the island by Fidel Castro almost exactly sixty years after the Spainish American War.
June 4, 2008 10:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
There is a very simple reason why the Germans accepted the allied occupation of their country after 1945. They had been thouroughly defeated. Out of a population of about 70 million people they had lost 3 to 4 million soldiers killed in action (this represents about 20% of their most able bodied men in the 20 to 50 years old range). These are the dead ones not the seriously wounded ones. In addition there were probably close to a million civilian deaths as well as the 12 million Germans from Prussia, Pomerania, Sudetanland and other eastern regions that were forced into exile into central Germany.
The survivors had no resistance left. We learned this lesson in the Phillipines after the Spanish-American war. We finally defeated the insurrection against our occupation only after killing somewhere between 7 to 10 percent of the native population. They were thoroughly defeated and then accepted our occupation.
If we were serious about applying these historical lessons to Iraq then we should have been willing to kill about 500,000 of their able bodied men or to kill 2 to 3 million of their general population. We lacked the will to do this, so now we are living with the consequences of a still active insurrection.
So the lesson from history is if we lack that will to kill at these levels then maybe we should avoid invading and trying to occupy other nations.
June 5, 2008 1:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
Didn't correct typos, sorry.
June 5, 2008 8:17 AM | Reply | Permalink