A Quick Fix in Iraq? Reminds Me of Reconstruction
On the eve of yet another escalation, the comparisons of Iraq and Vietnam are again on the rise. While parallels are obvious, one could easily find a more accurate comparison from further in the past and closer to home. A careful examination of the situation reveals that the story of Iraq resembles disturbingly the story of Reconstruction.
The comparison emerged first in the fall of 2003, when historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown first pointed out the disturbing similarities between Reconstruction and what was then an emerging chaos in Iraq, but three plus years since have only added to the sad tally of similarities between the situations.
Both the Civil War and operation against Iraq are stories of impressive military victories and miserable failures to win the peace. In both cases, the United States entered the conflict confident over its victory, but without a feasible plan to build a peace or reconstruct their defeated opponents, partially basing their plans on wishful visions of liberated people gobbling up democracy at first delirious exposure.
Lincoln’s scattered, underdeveloped thoughts and plans for reintroducing the defeated southern states to the Union were not as slipshod as the current administration’s fantastical optimism and lack of planning (“We will be greeted as liberators”), but it is obvious that Reconstruction was not in the forefront of Lincoln’s or his successor’s, Andrew Johnson’s, priorities.
By the time Radical Republicans succeeded in wrestling the control of Reconstruction from the President, 1866-67, it was, in many ways, already too late. The Klan and like-minded terrorist organizations had already rooted themselves in the South, fighting the insurgency war against their occupier’s efforts to convert the region into a facsimile of the more evolved, capitalist democracy of the United States above Mason-Dixon line.
As in Iraq today, the South witnessed the violent return of the previous ruling elites to the politics. Insurgent Baathists, as well as most sectarian rebels, share the southern Bourbons’ dislike of democracy and their willingness to negate its effects with a combination of political manouvering and violence.
Both Iraqi insurgents and Bourbons have demonstrated substantial skill in manipulating the region’s peculiar political culture and prejudices. U.S. military forces and American occupying officials, guided by bright-eyed idealism more suitable for Graham Greene’s protagonists, found themselves no match to hostile local operatives, with elaborate knowledge of the region’s complex culture and strained relationship between its main demographic groups. Baathists and Bourbons skillfully turned distrust into hate and violence, using them to advance their own political interests.
In Iraq as in the Reconstruction South, occupiers and those in need of their protection find themselves inside ever-shrinking circles of wagons, in relatively safety of U.S. military posts, while insurgents can operate almost openly in more remote provinces or counties. Sincere intents aside, U.S. military’s ability to protect Iraqis from violence is barely better than the protection it could offer to freedmen century and a half ago.
Now, with the rapidly growing intra-party fighting, the very same Republican party is, again, stuck with dissension and a seemingly unwinnable campaign that has long since run out of public enthusiasm. The President, under seige by a hostile Congress and a distrusting public, has again lost his ability to lead the chaotic operation.
During Reconstruction, the federal government could not protect democracy within its own borders. The ambitious futility of trying to perform the same task half a world away will be George W. Bush’s legacy, as he finds his position in presidential rankings slide near Andrew Johnson's.
In a perverse antithesis to Truman Doctrine, we see that committed, well-armed minorities can prevent democracy from taking hold. Maybe that is the sad lesson of Reconstruction and President Bush’s adventures in Iraq, a lesson we can overturn with patient peaceful encagement and moral authority, as happened with the South; not with the violent search for a quick fix -solution.