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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (137767)	6/24/2004 12:09:03 PM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I was responding to your post from the IPS. That is the link, after all......

To: epicure who wrote (137767)	6/24/2004 12:49:36 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

X, your points with respect to the differences between the invasion and occupation of Iraq as opposed to Germany are, in my opinion, well taken. The similarities are far outweighed by the differences. Germany had initiated a world wide war. It had been one of the strongest, if not the strongest, military powers in the world and it had fought long and hard and caused a tremendous amount of death and destruction in other nations. The German people understood that the war they were engaged in was an offensive war and that if they lost that war there would necessarily be an occupation, and potentially a very punitive one. The fact that West Germany was occupied by non-Russian allies was undoubtedly appreciated by the Germans there. The millions of men who'd lost their lives fighting for Germany, together with the huge number of civilian casualties, had left the German people sick of war and death. Their Nazi leaders had failed and the German people understood and accepted the consequences of failure. Their expectations for what life would bring following defeat were probably not high and many of them had already been living in barely subsistence conditions. Most of them were probably ready to cooperate and work with a benevolent occupation force that offered them peace and improved their ability to survive. The Iraqis, on the other hand, had no reason to feel that they "deserved" punishment. They hadn't attacked any countries for more than a decade and those attacks were on a tiny scale compared to the German invasions. The Iraqis hadn't left cities burnt out and devastated. They hadn't killed millions of men, women and children in an attempt to dominate the world. The ranks of their testosterone loaded men hadn't been decimated by years of war and death and most of them had lived relatively stable and comfortable lives with government subsidies. In view of what they hadn't done, and in view of what we stated publicly, they had high expectations becuase THEY WERE PROMISED FREEDOM, PROSPERITY AND SECURITY. Such high expectations, met with such low performance in an occupation setting, differentiate the willingness of the Germans and the unwillingness of the Iraqis to passively accept occupation. The degree of separation between the Iraqi/American cultures, primary religion and ethnicity and the German/American cultures, primary religion and ethnicity, and the long history of Persion Gulf resistance to occupation by Western nations, further differentiates the two situations. For someone to infer, ispso facto, that since occupation and transformation worked in Germany, it would work in Iraq, seems, in my opinion, simplistic and unrealistic.