Post-surrender mop-up - WWII

[Ken Estes]

Ken....

BDS is shorthand for 'Bush Derangement Syndrome'....Are you being serious or are you just being 'coy'?

nickm

Nope. Why would I know such things? Uh, particularly if you consider me among the afflicted? One really does not need a syndrome, mind you, to look with disfavor on Der Decider. Reading comprehension usually suffices.

[Tzefa]

For some reason, Ukranians were not too happy to belong to happy Soviet family. Ditto with Baltic states... Wonder why.

 

Maybe 20's and 30's famine had something to do with it with Ukraine. But maybe it was just a happy family smiling under the supervision of "Uncle Joe" Stalin...

Some of my recent posts might give the impression that I'm more sympathetic towards the USSR than I actually am.

Regardless...

These were no more "freedom fighters" than today's iraqi insurgents.

While a few maybe were fighting for independent Ukraine or whatever, most were just a collection of thugs and bandits, whom war gave the opportunity to arm themselves and run wild. They attacked and killed civil servants - doctors that were brought in to work in local clinics, teachers that were sent to teach in local school, government clerks, the odd policeman if they got a chance. All in cold bold and with vicious ruthlessness. When they needed supplies, they robbed their own peasants and threatened them to give them shelter.

When they were finally gone, everyone breathed a sign of relief because they could get on with their lives.

 

I've read that after Stalin's death, Soviet government offered a general amnesty for the insurgents, which brought out remaining hold-outs, except for few die-hards. I guess that eventually similar solution will be used in Iraq.

Yeah, its true. The amnesty was pretty sweeping, included many other groups as well.

 

There are some people posting here regularly who consider Stalins methods a model for solving current political problems, & often say so - though they tend not to credit Stalin.

He wasn't the first one to come up with that. Just, like most everything else about him and Russia in general, he did things on a grander scale.

Some of them actually worked.

[Brasidas]

I'm implying nothing of the sort. Again, you keep dodging the central theme. You said you hadn't read any articles that compared the post-war situation in Germany to the situation in Iraq. I provided links. You want to argue about them. They speak for themselves. I didn't write them.

 

Yes, and the operative phrase I stated was "Where did you dig to find them?" speaks for itself as well. I never said the articles in question don't exist, I simply implied they never saw much sunlight. I think it still applies.

[Heirophant]

What JOE BRENNAN said.

 

There is really no comparison between Iraq and the post-WW2 occupations.

 

IMHO, the post-WW2 mindsets of the German and Japanese populations were the key to their cooperation with the Allies (Western and Soviet).

 

People are not all THAT stupid, and the circumstances of the Second World War were known to most people, regardless of the propaganda thrown at them - propaganda spin can only go so far.

 

Being attacked and occupied, on the one hand, and initiating an attack, losing and being occupied, on the other, engender two extremely different mindsets among populations.

 

Germans and Japanese, in spite of their thirst for "just" revenge for past humiliations and injustices, knew that this time around (WW2), they were clearly the initiators of war. They had started it.

 

Having lost a vicious total war they had started, they were disinclined to resist further and bring more suffering upon themselves, for the sake of an independence which they realized they had risked and perhaps forfeited by being the aggressors. Certainly the leaders and people of socio-economic influence must have felt this way.

 

Contrast with the sheer ineffectiveness of the violent depopulations in China by the IJA. Low ball Western academic estimate of China's dead I've read: 22 million (high end: 35 million). Considering that the estimate of Nationalist soldiers killed is around 6 million, a lot of civilians were turned into red paste, and many cities and much of the countryside turned into a barren wasteland by the fighting - to no avail in pacifying the country. The people there knew their country was the victim, so would never accept that they had lost. So resistance continued completely regardless of additional suffering and in defiance of the logic of compromise.

 

Of course, one could say that the heroes of WW2 in Europe, the peoples of the USSR, endured at least as much hardship, or more, also without surrendering. I cite China simply because the Soviet Union was never beaten conventionally, and always possessed powerful means of fighting at its disposal and so never had a reason to accept German occupation. China was impotent militarily with no hope of winning bar things going south for Japan elsewhere - but partisan activity did not cease in spite of gruesome reprisal.

 

 

So, again IMHO, it was the German and Japanese awareness of their initiation of war, however justified, and their sense of having brought the consequences upon themselves, that was the key to their smooth occupation.

 

 

Having said that, Iraq is in no way comparable simply because it's not a nationalist nor religious insurgency. It is essentially a sectarian conflict, the ultimate outcome for which we must bear the burden of responsibility - no matter the cost, and however long it may take.

Edited June 15, 2008 by Heirophant

[Ken Estes]

....

Having said that, Iraq is in no way comparable simply because it's not a nationalist nor religious insurgency. It is essentially a sectarian conflict, the ultimate outcome for which we must bear the burden of responsibility - no matter the cost, and however long it may take.

Except that there is no logic behind your statement. The US invasion of the Iraq, however ill-considered, does not of itself prove that we must somehow drag those unfortunates to our standard of government, however alien it might be, "no matter the cost...." I would also consider that we are witnessing a continuation of nationalism evolving in Iraq since the end of the first British occupation, and the prime argument will remain what nationalism eventually triumphs; again, of no account to the US, likely not to be determined by the US, either.

[Heirophant]

Except that there is no logic behind your statement. The US invasion of the Iraq, however ill-considered, does not of itself prove that we must somehow drag those unfortunates to our standard of government, however alien it might be, "no matter the cost...." I would also consider that we are witnessing a continuation of nationalism evolving in Iraq since the end of the first British occupation, and the prime argument will remain what nationalism eventually triumphs; again, of no account to the US, likely not to be determined by the US, either.

 

What I am getting at is this: However rickety the Iraqi state was, no matter that it was indeed a house of cards, a place full of "kindling" and "fuel" just waiting for sufficient fire to be applied in order for there to be a blaze, a state on the verge of breakdown, the fact remains it was we who did the breaking, we who actually applied the flame, so to speak.

 

It was waiting to be broken, but WE did the actual breaking.

 

We don't need to and can't impose our way on them, but it behooves us to try and control the fire we've started, and keep it turning into a conflagration (a full blown civil war, partition of Iraq by outside powers and so forth). This is what I mean by whatever it takes, however long, whatever the cost.

 

Or, we can wash our hands of it, be done with it (Iraq), decide not to deal with the outcome of our smashing of the previous Iraqi state. We can decide to leave Iraq a huge mess, though we created the mess and exacerbated it.

 

But it just seems very wrong to do so, IMHO.

 

We broke it. We'll help fix it, with boots on the ground for years to come, if need be.

[Ariete!]

I tend to agree with Hierophant's analysis. Ken is right about the non-naitonalist aspects of the insurgency in a way beign more intractable but nationalist elements are clearly present (and to some extent conflated with certain forms of Sunni insurgency).

 

I think that the 'moral'/idelological aspect should never be underplayed in this sort of situation.

[cbo]

In 1945 the Allies had millions of troops in Germany, and they also retained the German police force to help keep order

 

In 2003 the Allies only had tens of thousands of troops in Iraq, and they disbanded the Iragi police force, and because they had so few troops it led to an immediate collapse of law and order.

 

As some of us have been saying for years: There is no problem in Iraq that could not have been solved by another 500.000 CoW troops deployed in 2003.

 

..or someone beaming up (most of) the Bush administration and returning them to the planet they originally came from

 

cbo