Occupations

...But if their handling of him had been incorrect, their discharge of the rest of the affair seemed to be perfect. As they drove to jail, the streets were deserted and not a shot had spoiled the tropic dawn.

"Pretty quiet for a revolution," the Small Man said with a faint smile.

"Why not?" the lieutenant said happily. "Your tyranny has sickened everyone. From now on there will be freedom in this country."

Mother of God, the Small Man thought. We are all young at some time but nobody has a right to be this young.

--From "The Tent of the Wicked," by Robert Switzer, 1956.

In the above-quoted novel, the quiet confidence of the Small Man, a banana republic dictator, turns out to be fully justified, and he soon regains control, though his rule is always under threat.

There can be no question of Saddam Hussein likewise regaining the power that he held for so long, even if the sentiment in Iraq is almost equally divided between those who think he should be shot and those who think he should be released. The evidence is too clear that he presided over some monumental blood-letting suffered by his own people as well as by Kurds, Iranians, and Kuwaitis, and a number of Iraqis justifiably mean to hold him to account. Meanwhile the Bush forces have to have something to show for all the lives and money that they invested in capturing Saddam. They don't have much else. So they're going to hold on to his person even if they have to bring him back for zoo exhibition in the U.S. He's their prime and so far only trophy of any real importance.

But a trophy of what?

Setting up two uncertain republics on either side of unfriendly Iran, that's what -- hot spots in which the Bush people have to keep large military forces always on hand, partly to protect the leaders that they installed and partly to fight guerillas that they have no real prospect of eliminating.

The Bush people mightily wish that Iraq and Afghanistan could emulate Germany and Japan after their surrenders in World War 2. The American occupations were quietly accepted, for the most part, by both those large populations. Unlike today's Iraq and Afghanistan, West Germany and Japan had stable, heterogenous, disciplined populations with no internal conflicts to keep their pots boiling.

The former Axis countries shrewdly saw economic advantages in letting the U.S. be responsible for their defense. Finally they could safely forgo the huge amount of expenditures necessary to maintain large military forces, and instead they could concentrate on rebuilding and pumping up their economies. This strategy was so successful that for a while in the 1970's and 1980's, if he were not told beforehand, a visitor from outer space would have supposed that Germany and Japan had been the victors in WW2, while the U.S., the Soviet Union, and Britain had been the losers, if the relative states of their economies were any indicators.

In contrast, the Bush military is seen by the Afghanis and Iraqis not as protectors but as oppressors, and its use of overwhelming and destructive firepower to assert itself yields only a harmful kind of respect.

No, Saddam cannot succeed himself ...but younger people who grew up studying in his "academy" can.

A news item out of Iraq today says that the militant Shi'a cleric, Mugtada al-Sadr, has seemingly reversed recent comments of apparent conciliation, and has vowed to continue his military campaign to rid Iraq of the occupying forces, even if those forces feel that that's no longer what they should be called.