A tale of two occupations

Harvey Stockwin does a nice job of comparing the U.S. occupations of Japan and Iraq in The Japan Times.

HONG KONG -- History did not repeat itself in Iraq as the Americans naively expected. While it has become obvious that U.S. intelligence reports and analysis were deficient in the runup to the war, less attention has been paid to the fact that the United States occupied Iraq imbued with a dubious historical perspective.

Quite clearly, the occupation of Iraq was premised on the calculation that since the U.S. postwar occupations of West Germany and Japan were a great success, the administration of President George W. Bush would now repeat it.

So, what was different:

• While Japan was occupied for the first time in it's history, the U.S. occupation of Iraq was one of many.


• There was extensive planning for the occupation of Japan long before the war ended. There was little or no planning for the occupation of Iraq.


• MacArthur was seen daily by the Japanese while Bremmer rarely left the Green Zone.


• Inspite of a lack of resistance, MacArthur had nearly 1 million troops. When Gen. Eric Shinseki said he would need 150,000 troops he was fired by Rumsfeld.


• MacArthur retained the Japanese bureaucracy and the Emperor working through them to implement orders. Bremmer dissolved the Ba'ath party bureaucracy and the army and attempted to implement order through a military administration.


• Since the major Japanese institutions were in place they were able to maintain order. Because there was no Iraqi infrastructure and there were insufficient U.S. troops order was never achieved in Iraq.

Because of proper pre-victory planning and post victory implementation the occupation of Japan was a success. The Iraq occupation has been a disaster because the incompetent leadership did little planning or implementation.