Experts question the parallel to rebuilding after WW II

Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau Thursday, March 20, 2003

Washington -- In the months leading to war with Iraq, President Bush has often cited the postwar reconstruction of Germany and Japan, the greatest -- and most successful -- such undertaking in American history.

Just as the fascist regimes of Europe and Japan were transformed after World War II into democracies that secured peace in the latter 20th century, Bush has argued that a reborn Iraq can serve as a catalyst for democracy and peace throughout the fragile, dangerous and ancient terrain of the Middle East.

"This threat is new; America's duty is familiar," Bush said in his January State of the Union address. "Throughout the 20th century, small groups of men seized control of great nations, built armies and arsenals and set out to dominate the weak and intimidate the world. In each case, the ambitions of Hitlerism, militarism and communism were defeated by the will of free peoples. . . . Once again, we are called to defend the safety of our people and the hopes of all mankind. And we accept this responsibility."

PARALLELS NOT SO TIDY But historians and foreign policy analysts, including many conservatives sympathetic to the administration, warn that the parallels are hardly so neat and the hoped-for outcomes far from guaranteed.

For Bush's vision to succeed, they say, not only must the war go smoothly but also the peace -- in a country that has seen little of that in its long history.

"I think he really believes it," said Thomas Henriksen, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. "He does see the world as good and evil and believes the argument that democracies don't fight each other and are more peaceful. I'll give him that. But to do it is not going to be that easy."

Indeed, many believe that the closer parallel is not the luminous examples of post World War II nation-building but the far more recent and less tested efforts in Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan.

Germany and Japan offer "a seductive parallel that hearkens to one of our best moments in the history of our efforts at nation-building, so it's as good as it gets," added Thomas Carothers, a democracy specialist the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "But I think there are significant differences in the situation that both Japan and Germany were in at that time and where Iraq is now."

Yet time and again, with stirring rhetoric, Bush has pointed not to Kosovo, where his Democratic predecessor, President Bill Clinton, sent in troops without U.N. approval to rebuild a nation, but to Germany and Japan.

PERMANENT HOME FOR LIBERTY After World War II, "We did not leave behind occupying armies, we left constitutions and parliaments," Bush said Feb. 26 at the American Enterprise Institute. "In societies that once bred fascism and militarism, liberty found a permanent home. There was a time when many said that the cultures of Japan and Germany were incapable of sustaining democratic values. Well, they were wrong."

But using these two nations as models, said Tom Keaney, executive director of the Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins University's Center for Strategic and International Studies, "leads more to immediate error than anything else."

Both Japan and Germany, prior to World War II and after it, were quite different from today's Iraq, scholars say.

Both had experience with democratic government that -- while obviously flawed -- nonetheless laid a foundation on which to build. Both enjoyed extraordinarily enlightened postwar leaders, Konrad Adenauer in Germany and Yoshida Shigeru in Japan.

"Iraq has had none of that," said Henriksen. "It's been a brutal dictatorship, one after another."

HOSTILE ETHNIC GROUPS Germany and Japan were homogeneous societies, not the fractured collection of hostile ethnic groups that is modern-day Iraq, first drawn on a map by colonial Britain.

Both had sophisticated economies with a diversified industrial base and a broad middle class. Iraq's economy is highly oil-dependent, with little industry and a middle class dramatically weakened by decades of war and international economic sanctions.

Oil-rich economies are rarely democratic, Carothers said, today's lone exception being Norway. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are monarchies; Nigeria, Indonesia and Venezuela "have all had huge troubles politically because of oil, " he said.

Oil-based economies concentrate wealth and political power in the hands of the few, who then do not want to relinquish it to an opposition group in a democratic election, he noted. Moreover, he said, vast, easily siphoned oil revenues fuel political corruption, even as they create a dependent population accustomed to relying on the state rather than self-governance.

LITERATE MIDDLE CLASS Still, others argue that despite years of oppression under Hussein, Iraq is a good candidate for democracy because its large middle class is one of the most literate in the Arab world.

Though reconstruction of a post-Hussein Iraq can't be compared to Germany and Japan, said Hoover Institution research fellow Guity Nashat, Iraqis could gladly embrace democracy -- as Kurds have shown in northern Iraq, where they have run an autonomous region for several years with the help of a no-fly zone patrolled by U.S. and British aircraft.

"It's only been three to four years that Kurds have had more autonomy, and they are functioning," said Nashat, an associate professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago and an expert on the Middle East. "It's a much more workable democracy than anywhere else in the Arab world."

Perhaps most important, scholars said, Iraq's experience of war will be different from Japan's and Germany's at the end of World War II.

"Both Germany and Japan tried the project of fascism, they were defeated at it, and the societies were exhausted," said Carothers. "They recognized that they had gone down a terribly wrong path, and they were ready to try something very different."

To be sure, Iraqis have been brutally oppressed by Saddam Hussein, "but there isn't the same sense that this war comes as a result of a wholesale recognition of failure on their part," he said. Iraqis, he warned, "haven't asked for this Western project of democratization. It's being thrust on them. I'm sure some will be sympathetic to it, but many will not be."

'HUMBLE' FOREIGN POLICY Ironically, Bush campaigned as as an international realist, urging a "humble" foreign policy and showing disdain for Clinton's "nation-building" and military interventions during the 1990s in Haiti, Somalia and Bosnia.

His national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, once said the 82nd Airborne should not be escorting children to school in far-off lands. Today, the administration proposes a wholesale rebuilding of Iraq's education system.

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Bush has metamorphosed from realist to an idealist so bold Woodrow Wilson might blush.

Critics on the left may view the Bush administration as "an evil cabal plotting to install American corporations all over the world," said Christopher Preble, director of foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. He contends the administration "is doing this for what they perceive to be the right reasons, and out of benign intentions. But you know what they say about the road to hell."

E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at clochhead@sfchronicle.com.