On the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, John Dower, a historian of postwar Japan, wrote a prescient essay in the Boston Review in which he warned how hard Washington would find it to impose its democratic agenda on Iraq. At the time, officials advising Jay Garner, the retired army general who was to lead a brief and disastrous Iraqi transitional government, were poring over histories of postwar Germany and Japan for clues about how to manage an occupation. Mr Dower’s Embracing Defeat, an account of the US’s success at Japanese nation-building, was top of the pile.
But the grim verdict from Mr Dower himself was that, while comparisons with Japan, where the US sowed the seeds of “democratic revolution from above”, were irresistible, they were also worthless. Few, if any, of the ingredients that led to success in Japan, from its total defeat to its sense of national purpose, were present in Iraq.
Read Full Article »