A couple of nights ago, the PBS News Hour had a roundtable discussion of the historical parallels of American occupation after a war victory. Michael Beschloss, once again provided his trademark search for overlooked historical minutiae (here the prospect that Hitler had survived in the Bavarian hills) instead of offering broader-picture analysis of historical movement and causation. But in general the historians provided a useful reminder of why Iraq is not going to be a postwar Japan or Germany. One point they didn’t emphasize enough is the issue of imperialism: World War II was fought between competing industrial powers and antogonistic ideologies. It was a total war and the vanquished knew the stakes. In contrast, American occupation of Iraq will always be suspect precisely because of its history of guiding foreign policy to serve narrow economic interests. As one of the NewsHour panelists notes,
the United States military intervened very frequently in many Central American and Caribbean countries in the early part of the 20th century: Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti, Dominican Republic. Some of these interventions went on for 20 years, as in Haiti; in Nicaragua, sort of on and off for 20 or 25 years. And at the end of the day, it wasn’t the single case, in which when we left we could leave behind stability other than in the hands of a dictator.
We really didn’t claim democracy to be a major purpose then. It was really more about order and our own interests, particularly our economic interests. But we also fueled a lot of anti-American nationalism and planted many of the seeds of instability that were part of our problems after World War II.
While Latin America is the textbook example, imperialism was certainly not limited to there - witness the Shah of Iran. Yet conservatives act as if it doesn’t exist, and neo-lib hawks are so eager to assert the need for U.S. involvement they downplay the history as well. Certainly, the Chomskyite left is wrong in its belief that everything flows from U.S. imperialism and even that said imperialism can be read in simple terms (Yugoslavia = Caspian oil, for example). But in using the might of American power and money as a fulcrum to gain even laudable ends (and let’s face it, not all of our ends are laudable), it is in our interests to be aware of how that power can and will be resented.
Particularly as Liberia is showing up the hollowness of our humanitarian reasons for the Iraq war by the minute - is Taylor not also an evil despot? if a fraction of the resources could make even more appreciable improvement in peoples lives there than in Iraq, why not deploy them? - the gulf between our stated foreign policy objectives (even if hawks believe what they say) and our real ones needs to be addressed.
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