|
In an October 2002 op-ed in the New York Times, MIT professor John W. Dower wrote that although the US occupation of Japan after World War II didn’t offer a model for a post-war Iraq, "it does provide a clear warning — even under circumstances that turned out to be favorable, demilitarization and democratization were awesome challenges. To rush to war without seriously imagining all its consequences, including its aftermath, is not realism but a terrible hubris." Such words, of course, now seem prophetic because of the ongoing problems facing the US occupation in Iraq. On Tuesday, October 7, Dower, 65, will speak during the inaugural session of the 2003 Action Speaks Lecture Series at AS220 (115 Empire St., Providence, www.as220. org). Joining Dower for the 5:30 p.m. discussion, entitled, "Can Democracy Be ‘Imposed?,’ " will be William Martel, professor of national security at the Naval War College in Newport, and Neta Crawford, an associate professor at Brown University. The Phoenix is a cosponsor of Action Speaks, which is focusing this year on democracy, freedom, and security. The connections and differences between pre- and post-war Japan have been a particular source of interest for Dower, a Providence native and graduate of Classical High School, since he studied there as an undergrad in the late ’50s. His 1999 book, Embracing Defeat: Japan In the Wake of World War II (W.W. Norton & Company), won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. He talked with the Phoenix last week by phone from his MIT office. Q: What led you to take the view, as you wrote last year, that America’s occupation of Japan after World War II did not provide a model for a constructive US role in a post-Saddam Iraq? A: It seemed clear to me even before the war that the administration was using occupied Japan and occupied Germany simply for PR purposes and it was not an analogy to be taken seriously. This was simply politics. If you really looked, and I think this was true to anyone who knew what took place in Japan and what took place in Germany, it was clear that these should have been warnings that the situation in Iraq would be very different and extremely problematic. What Japan tells you is, this will be disastrous — this will be chaos in the case of Iraq. No one in the administration wanted to hear that, because we have an administration that only wishes to hear what suits its own political purposes, so it wasn’t taken seriously. It wasn’t just me — it’s many, many people who were giving public symposiums at the time, who knew about these historical situations. Those who knew about Iraq were warning that Iraq would be very problematic in a post-hostilities situation. This was not a surprise to people who did serious history. Q: Now that the US is occupying Iraq, how do you see the outlook? A: If we continue to blunder and move with as much ignorance in the future as we have to the present moment, I see extremely dark times ahead. I think it’s a policy that was conceived in ignorance and is being pursued with arrogance, and which has very ominous consequences for ourselves and for others. Like many people observing the situation, I’m very concerned about our well-being and the well-being of people elsewhere. Q: The September 11 attacks, like Pearl Harbor, marked one of the rare times in modern history when a foreign enemy has struck the US at home. How has America’s relative distance from conflict influenced its view of going to war in Iraq? A: Let’s step back. I think the immediate response in the United States to September 11 was to evoke comparison to Pearl Harbor. You immediately had headlines almost everywhere in the country speaking of infamy, a new day of infamy, and so on. I think it was understandable this was the first thing that American thought of. It was a shocking attack. It was even more shocking than Pearl Harbor, because it struck in mainland America, in the heart of a major city, and the casualties were civilian, rather than military, so this really struck close to home. This struck ever closer to home than Pearl Harbor did at that time. The shock was enormous. The fact that intelligence had failed to predict this attack was something that immediately came up in Americans’ minds as a point of comparison to Pearl Harbor. And the immediate response in America was one of wrath and a clear sense of retribution; we will take vengeance for this terrible act. The Pearl Harbor analogy was a natural one, and it was almost universal throughout the United States. But if you look at this as a historian, there are other ways of looking at this as well, other parallels that Americans don’t draw, but that others have drawn, including Al Qaeda and the terrorists. After September 11, for example, the New York Times ran an article that was buried, and it reported that the CIA had intercepted an Al Qaeda communication before September 11. And that communication said bin Laden was planning a "Hiroshima" for America. That’s what the New York Times said. When we Americans then looked at the World Trade Center, the newspapers then came out with a new [name], which was not Pearl Harbor, but Ground Zero. Ground Zero was originally Hiroshima-Nagasaki, so suddenly we have another perspective, which is this isn’t Pearl Harbor, the attack on the US, but an attack from the air on civilians, aimed at destroying civilian morale. To historians, it’s going back to World War II. So what has happened, the image has shifted here, the historic point of reference, from Pearl Harbor and what the Japanese did to the US, to the end of WWII and what the Americans did to Japan. And so we have a whole different set of metaphors. Q: If you were making policy, what would you advice be on the US role in Iraq? A: [Laughs] If I was making policy, I would immediately get rid of the entire defense team that proposed this fiasco from the beginning — Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, Libby. I would step back in making policy and say, how could my national security advisers, who are supposed to be weighing different intelligence reports and presenting them to the president, allow such totally incompetent post-hostilities planning to have got up to the president? History will say that this was an extraordinarily ill-conceived, poorly planned war, and why we allow the same people to make policy is something you have ask the president. I’d also say that present polices, in my view, are compounding the crisis in Iraq. And by that I have in mind both acts of omission, such as the failure to provide security or restoration of basic facilities. But I also have in mind acts of commission, such as the announced plans to privatize the whole economy, except for oil, and allow foreign companies to move in and gain ownership of those companies. I think this can only have a colossal backlash. There’s a famous phrase in the CIA called blowback — the unintended consequences of our actions. The war against in Iraq has just had the most dire, destabilizing blowback imaginable, and I just think that our present policies are contributing to even more dire and destructive responses. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Issue Date: October 3 - 9, 2003 Back to the Features table of contents |
Sponsor Links | |||
---|---|---|---|
© 2000 - 2007 Phoenix Media Communications Group |