I have spent much time here at the Spew discussing various analogies and kinds of analogies, including how IR can be like tacos and how to make a good IR pop culture analogy. I love using analogies, and have often used them in my teaching, even as I know that they have their limits (thanks, Robert Jervis).
But if I had to nominate one analogy to kill, to kill with fire, to destroy utterly, it would be the use of the occupations of Germany and Japan to discuss 21st century state-building/nation-building/post-war reconstruction. I was inspired/depressed by this chain of tweets:
Entirely possible to break foes w/out committing whole of a nation. More about foe breaking point. https://t.co/GdiWELa45v #DefOneSummit2015— Kelsey D. Atherton (@AthertonKD) November 2, 2015
.@AthertonKD our problem is not breaking foes. It is dealing with the consequences, post breaking: A-stan, Iraq, Libya. We suck at that— Steve Saideman (@smsaideman) November 2, 2015
@smsaideman @AthertonKD Perhaps not broken enough? Germany and Japan recovered well, but had been thoroughly crushed.— Steve Daly, CD (@SteveDaly15) November 2, 2015
The various activities–occupation, counter-insurgency, reconstruction–the US and its allies have been involved in since 2001 are sufficiently different from ye olde glory daze of post-World War II occupations that we need to stop looking to them for lessons, except perhaps some humility and some budgeting (as in: this stuff is mighty expensive).
There are plenty of folks who have written books on occupation, so consult them. The one I want to read is Michael Hechter’s since he has a chapter on academic departments in receivership–a topic I know well via direct experience. So, maybe there is something we can glean from the decisions/processes of 70 years ago. But thus far, the only lessons we seem to have learned are the wrong ones–de-ba’athification in Iraq was supposedly modeled on denazification, and that worked out great for Iraq’s ability to govern itself.
As a social scientist, I am committed to studying the past to understand the present and make suggestions about the future. But those two occupations might be so exceptional that either there is not much to be learned or that the lessons are really, really difficult to apply and perhaps do not apply to ordinary cases of war/defeat/what-next.
Anyone got a stake or a silver bullet or some other pop culture analogical weapon to kill this particular analogy? Anyone? Bueller? See, analogies and references are irresistible.
Update: PT suggested that the better analogy might be US reconstruction after the civil war, which is still going on. Indeed, I am reminded of a US officer I met in Tuza, Bosnia in 2001 who proudly showed me his unit’s patch–a purple and gray ying yang symbol. He gave it to Bosnians to remind them that the US overcame its civil war. And I wanted to tell at him that it took the US either 100 years (Civil Rights Act) or beyond that..
I think post-WWII Japan and Germany are great examples for reconstruction in A-stan, Iraq, Libya. 70 years after WWII, the US still has 37 thousand military personnel in Germany and 48 thousand in Japan. 12 years after the invasion, the US has 3,550 troops in Iraq… It is not that the US ‘suck at that’ or solely that countries and conditions on the ground are very different (post-WWII Japan and Germany were also very different from each other). The fact is that reconstruction policies now and then were planned and implemented very differently. In the first case, mostly due to WWII and the Cold War, the US eventually got around the idea of paying the costs of occupation and reconstruction and were in for the long term (in fact, still are in it). For contemporary cases, however, the US wanted to do it the cheap way and come home as soon as possible.
Well, the US has been in A’stan for 12 years, tried hard to stay in Iraq, never was in Libya. And it’s hard to see US troops in Japan or Germany doing much “nation-building” after, say, 1950 or so. Reconstruction of any sort is very much the exception, and successful reconstructions even more so (see Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, US in the Confederacy…). As the psychologists might say, people have to want to be reconstructed. So I’m with the post – that you have won the lottery once does not mean you can do it again just by buying the same numbers at the same agency…
Were reconstruction efforts in Germany and Japan anywhere near as
corrupt as those in A’stan and Iraq? I don’t know, but corruption (and
related ineffectiveness) seems to be a hallmark of recent efforts.
Also, wasn’t it the case that German and Japanese forces went along with
their government’s respective surrenders, such that fighting quickly stopped
afterwards? That seems a huge difference from A’stan and Iraq (cf Peter
Thomson’s point about wanting to be reconstructed). In A’stan
there were two main enemies, al Qaeda and the Taliban, neither of which
surrendered; in Iraq there were those “dead-enders” whose “last gasp”
is still ongoing.