The power of the POW

“Following World War II, we lifted up the defeated nations of Japan and Germany, and stood with them as they built representative governments. We committed years and resources to this cause. And that effort has been repaid many times over in three generations of friendship and peace. America today accepts the challenge of helping Iraq in the same spirit -- for their sake, and our own.”

- President Bush, 9/7/03

We've all heard the comparison between the reconstruction projects of World War II and what we're attempting to do in Iraq right now. This article from the day after Bush made this speech includes this very fine rebuttal:

There are some key differences between Germany and Japan of 1945 and Iraq today. Germany had a democratic parliamentary system prior to Hitler seizing power in the early 1930s and Japan had some semblance of a constitutional monarchy prior to the rise of militarism in the late 1920s, whereas Iraq has never had a representative government. Germany and Japan were homogeneous societies with a strong sense of national identity, whereas Iraq is an artificial creation thrown together by colonial powers from three Ottoman provinces by and has only been truly independent for just 45 years; fighting between various Iraqi religious and ethnic groups has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands in recent decades. In addition, most Germans and Japanese recognized that their defeat and occupation was a direct result of their leaders' aggression against the countries’ neighbors, whereas the Iraqis -- whose government was far weaker and less aggressive during its final twelve years than it was in the past -- are more prone to see the American takeover as an act of Western imperialism, not self-defense. As a result, it will be quite difficult for the United States to establish a widely accepted and stable regime. Finally, the idealistic New Deal liberals who helped create open political systems in post-war Germany and Japan arguably had a stronger personal commitment to democracy than the right-wing neoconservatives in the Bush administration, who have a history of supporting dictatorial governments that support U.S. strategic and economic interests.

However, that article was written months before the abuse at Abu Ghraib became public. Looking at the difference between World War II and the Iraq War in terms of how we treated POWs also reveals another stark difference.

I received an email last summer from someone I knew travelling through Germany. She was on a train, and an older German man recognized that she was an American, and began to tell her about the time he had spent as a POW in Kansas during the War. He actually had fond memories of the locals and found America to be a warm and inviting place. No interrogations. No dogs. Not even a single testicle attached to a car battery.

This website gives some good information about one of these POW camps in Mississippi. This site actually lists out all the sites across the nation. All told, there were a couple hundred thousand German and Japanese POWs living and working in the United States at that time. They were doing some public works projects, meeting Americans, and getting familiar with the lifestyle and culture that Americans had been building across the Atlantic and Pacific for almost 200 years.

It's difficult to really measure the effect that these men had upon their return in the rebirth and reconstruction of Germany and Japan, but it shouldn't take a lot of convincing that they were more trusting of the Americans than if they'd been photographed naked on a pile of their countrymen.

While our bumbling embarrassment of a Vice President stammers incoherently about the perils of fighting a sensitive war, I'll just quietly add another item to my growing list of why we succeeded in Germany and Japan, but failed in Iraq.