AFTER LIBERATION: America as occupier: A short history

'From the folks who brought you preemptive war, here comes preemptive peace." So writes American Prospect editor-at-large Harold Meyerson, in a Washington Post op-ed warning of the perils the US will soon face in Iraq.

"The decision to run postwar Iraq as an adjunct of the Defense Department may prove even more fateful than the decision to go to war... It fairly begs the world to view us as occupiers rather than nation-builders."

Plenty more blood may yet be shed before the US and UK declare victory in Iraq. Yet just as dire forecasts were made of a conflict that so far has proved remarkably successful, so too are gloomy scenarios being sketched of the occupation to come.

"The quickest way to turn a military victory in Iraq into a political defeat in the Middle East is to install an American military viceroy in Baghdad, followed by a puppet Iraqi government," editorializes The New York Times. Instead, the Times urges the Bush administration to turn matters over to "an interim administration under UN sponsorship," a view shared by the Financial Times, the Independent and other newspapers.

In fact, the US has an old and mostly creditable record as an occupier. The best example is its postwar occupation of Japan, where it was precisely an American military viceroy - Douglas MacArthur - who transformed one of the world's most militaristic societies into one of its most pacific in the space of a few years.

Japan was not the first American success story. Fifty years earlier in the Philippines, Arthur MacArthur (Douglas's father) quelled a brutal rebellion as the first US military governor following the Spanish-American war, then set the new colony on the course to self-rule. Military rule ended in 1901; by 1907, Filipinos controlled the lower house of the legislature and by 1916 they exercised sovereign rule on domestic matters. It was only after the US withdrew, in 1946, that authoritarianism gradually returned in the person of Ferdinand Marcos.

The US also intervened rather freely in the Caribbean. It occupied Cuba from 1898 to 1902, and returned again from 1906 to 1909. It ruled Haiti from 1915 to 1934 - probably the happiest period in that country's 200-year history - and the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924. In 1965, US troops returned to the Dominican Republic to prevent a Communist takeover and oversaw free elections the following year; the country has had elected governments ever since. Later, in Grenada in 1983, in Panama in 1989, and in Haiti in 1994, the US intervened to install or restore democratic governments.

THE HISTORY of America's four significant interventions in the 1990s is particularly instructive. In Somalia in 1992-1993, in Haiti in 1994-1995, and in Kosovo in 1999, the US quickly relinquished administrative control to the UN. By contrast, in the Bosnian intervention that began in 1995, it has retained substantial authority. The differences between the first three operations and the last are telling.

The Somali intervention, known as "Operation Restore Hope," came about after 300,000 Somalis had starved to death and 1.5 million more were at serious risk. As Michael Ledeen notes, its straightforward mission was to "apply the tourniquet." Within three months, it succeeded. Food supplies were reaching the people; "the bleeding had stopped."

Rather than end matters there, however, the UN Security Council (with the Clinton administration's blessing), decided to undertake an exercise in nation building. UN peacekeepers rolled in as US forces were scaled back to a minimum. The result is well-known: the UN was unable to fulfill its mandate, US forces proved an insufficient deterrent to rampaging Somali militias, and 18 Americans were killed on a raid in Mogadishu. Today, Somalia remains a failed state.

Equally dreary is the story of America's intervention in Haiti to overthrow the military junta led by Raoul Cedras in favor of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Both were equally nasty creatures: Cedras was the master of the death squad; Aristide of the mob. But Aristide had been democratically elected, and he had the backing of the UN Security Council, which had expressly authorized military force in order to "Restore Democracy," as the operation was dubbed.

The operation, begun in September 1994, formally ended in March 1995, when it was replaced by UNMIH - the United Nations mission in Haiti. What followed has been an uninterrupted reign of terror by Aristide and his henchmen. For example, in the fall of 2001, Haitian journalist Brignol Lindor hosted a radio show that included government critics. A police investigation described his subsequent murder at the hands of an Aristide mob this way:

"His tie is pulled dragging his body forward as another individual, totally hysterical, hit him with a pickaxe on the back, piercing him through the chest. Then his frail body is sliced with machetes, knives, as if he were a dangerous animal. The crowd holds him by the tie and drags his body through the streets then turns the bloody and massacred cadaver face up. One of them suggests burning Lindor's body, the majority protests saying that they must leave the body as an example and as a symbol."

Then there's Kosovo. Unlike Haiti, a US-led coalition sidestepped the UN Security Council to avoid an almost certain Russian veto of military action. After 70-plus days of bombing, Serb forces withdrew from the breakaway province and the US and NATO allies stepped in with 40,000 troops.

In the days that followed, the US's 82nd Airborne Division had no choice but to administer Kosovo's civil functions. The Americans "arranged for town council meetings, kept the sewage plant open and collected the trash," writes Matthew Kaminski, a Wall Street Journal reporter then embedded with the division.

And then the UN stepped in: "Heating and electricity failed when temperatures dropped 20 below zero. Nine months after the end of the war, trash wasn't picked up in Pristina. The rats and the mosquitoes that thrived in the heaps strewn around town passed around diseases not seen for generations. German garbage trucks were flown in months before, but the UN didn't have the cash to buy fuel to get them on the road. The West promised 1.2 billion euros to rebuild, led by the EU, but the money got through the bureaucratic hoops so slowly the UN mission in Kosovo threatened to file for bankruptcy."

NOW CONSIDER the alternative case of Bosnia, which is particularly instructive in two respects: first, because in Bosnia as in Iraq, the country divides into three highly fractious ethnic groups; and second, because the failure of UN peacekeeping efforts preceded US intervention. As a result, the UN has not played much of a role since.

By no measure has the result been an unqualified success: unemployment is sky-high; ethnic tensions linger; the federal government barely even meets. Then again, neither has there been any killing in the seven-plus years since the Dayton Accords took hold, nor any reign of terror by any of the three autonomous governments. Hard-line parties have given way to more moderate ones through a democratic process. NATO troops have prevented Bosnia from descending into a gangster state. Ten thousand American troops guarantee the peace, eliciting considerable trust and relatively few complaints from Muslims, Croats and Serbs alike. It's a considerable achievement by any standard, and a monumental one when set next to the record of the UN.

This is not to say that the Bosnian model fits Iraqi realities. But it should give pause to those who doubt the ability of the US military not only to win the peace in the way it now looks set to win the war. And as for those who'd rather consign Iraq's future to the UN - well, weren't they the ones who, just a month ago, would have consigned the country to Saddam Hussein?

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I just love it when those who didn't want you to act in the first place, now want to define what the action produced and what we need to do next. I think in order for us to consider their opinions they must submit their diatribes written pre-war for our review, otherwise just shut up!!

I have one question - why on earth should be assume that pundits who were spectacularly and categorically wrong about every aspect of the military operations in Iraq be any less wrong about how to run a civilian government?

Obviously, we shouldnt listen to such pundits. Do you take stock tips from someone who lost it all in the 'bubble and bust'?

In Vietnam, the term "Credibility gap" came to be used to refer to the Johnson administration. Now we can use it on the many media pundits, the New York Times, CNN, and other media organs who failed to credibly account for facts, analyze and predict events.

There is a yawning credibility gap, especially among the 'skeptical media' that dislikes Bush. But they wont talk about. It's the crazy aunt in the attic.

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