Fortunately, this one is available online in two places. A Warning from History: Don’t expect democracy in Iraq Boston Review Feb/Mar 2003 contains the first four sections of the book version (with slight editing for the book version), and the final three parts appeared in both Dower on the Occupiers, 1931/2003 TomDispatch.com 06/20/2003 and The Other Japanese Occupation Mother Jones Online 04/27/2006. The quotations here are from the Boston Review and TomDispatch versions.
Dower cautions his readers that Americans have much to learn, not only from the postwar occupation but also from the Japanese Empire at war:
Although we speak of a military takeover of Japan in the 1930s, electoral politics and most functions of civil society continued through war into the postwar era. Tojo himself was eased from power, in proper parliamentary manner, in 1944. No one could stop the machine he and his fellow right-wing radicals had set in motion, however, until the war came home, culminating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan's was a short ride as empires go, but the devastation left in its wake was enormous.When it comes to the occupation itself, one element present in the Japanese case not present with the US occupation of Iraq is that partly intangible but vital quality of legitimacy:
Despite the deepening quagmire of occupation and empire, Japanese leaders and followers alike soldiered on - driven by patriotic ardor and a pitiful fatalism. It was only afterwards, in the wake of defeat, that pundits and politicians and ordinary people stepped back to ask: How could we have been so deceived?
We are in a better position to answer this now. (my emphasis)
The postwar occupation of Japan possessed a great intangible quality that simply will not be present in the event of a U.S. war against Iraq. It enjoyed virtually unquestioned legitimacy — moral as well as legal - in the eyes of not merely the victors but all of Japan’s Asian neighbors and most Japanese themselves. Japan had been at war for almost fifteen years. It had declared war on the Allied powers in 1941. It had accepted the somewhat vague terms of surrender "unconditionally" less than four years later. Quite the opposite can be anticipated if the United States attacks and then occupies Iraq. The United States will find the legitimacy of its actions widely challenged—within Iraq, throughout the Middle East and much of the rest of the world, and even among many of its erstwhile supporters and allies.The "idealists" of the New Deal also approached the occupation of Iraq in a far more pragmatic manner that the Cheney-Bush administration's holy warriors and free-market zealots:
What made the occupation of Japan a success was two years or so of genuine reformist idealism before U.S. policy became consumed by the Cold War, coupled with a real Japanese embrace of the opportunity to start over. There are moments in history - fleeting occasions of opportunity - when people actually sit down and ask, "What is a good society? How can we bring this about?" Winners in war do not ask this of themselves. Winners tend to say we won, we're good, we’re righteous, what we did was just, now it’s time to get back to business and build on our strengths. But losers - certainly in the case of Japan - are under more compulsion to ask what went wrong and what they might do to make sure they don’t fall into the same disasters again.There certainly are things we can learn from history. Even things more specific than the destruction and horror of war and a sense of humility (or at least modesty) about American ability to impose our will on other nations.
American policy toward defeated Japan meshed with this Japanese sense of failure and the necessity of starting over. The Americans may not have been self-critical, but they had definite ideas about what needed to be done to make Japan democratic. Much of this thinking came from liberals and leftists who had been associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s progressive New Deal policies - policies that were already falling out of favor in Washington before the war ended. One might say that the last great exercise of New Deal idealism was carried out by Americans in defeated Japan. It was this combination of the Americans using their "unconditional" authority to crack open the old authoritarian system and Japanese at all levels seizing this opportunity to make the reforms work that accounts for the success of the occupation. (my emphasis)
But the careless application of bad historical analogies is leaving an incredible amount of unnecessary damage in its wake.
Tags: iraq war, japan, second world war
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