Sovereignty, democracy and militarism

[Dover]

Sovereignty, democracy and militarism
By Henry C K Liu

US President George W Bush has frequently used post-war Germany and Japan as examples to support his claim that democracy could be successfully imposed on nations previously under autocratic governments. Yet both Germany and Japan had strong social democratic traditions prior to being taken over after World War I by fascist parties that promoted militarism as a means of national revival. After World War II ended with the defeat of fascist militarism in these two nations, the early election returns in both under United States occupation so favored socialist candidates that US occupation authorities had to quickly release fascist war criminals from prison and back them with funds and political support in order to save both Japan and West Germany from democratically elected leftist governments. Fascism was reconstituted under the guise of capitalistic democracy to fight socialism, notwithstanding that the pre-war rise of fascism was brought about by the same flawed strategy that eventually led to World War II.

In August 2003, six months into the US invasion of Iraq, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, then assistant to the president for national security affairs, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld both compared the post-invasion bedlam in Iraq to that in post-war Germany in 1945. Rice, in a speech at the 104th National Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in San Antonio, Texas, said: "SS officers - called 'werewolves' - engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them - much like today's Ba'athist and Fedayeen remnants." The insurgent attacks in Germany eventually died down as Nazis were released from prison by the Allies to run Germany under US occupation and supervision. Perhaps Rice was suggesting by her comparison between Iraq and Germany that Ba'athists should be reconstituted to run post-invasion Iraq with a reversal of the US policy of regime change, even if Ba'athism is not at all comparable to Nazism. And there are signs that Ba'athist rehabilitation is quietly happening in Iraq.

The marginalization of the Ba'athists was the most serious error made by the US in its post-war policy on Iraq, along with the decision to disband the Iraqi military. These errors arose from the flawed war objective of regime change. Regime change for the enemy is an innate purpose of holy war and it has no place in secular war aims. Victory in a secular war between states is achieved by coercing the government of the defeated nation to submit to the will of the victor. To achieve that aim, the enemy government needs to be preserved as a functioning polity. A regime change in a defeated nation provides an opening for a new government to reject the terms of surrender, an undesirable political development for the victor. Only a holy war will fashion regime change as a war objective, on the basis of a good-versus-evil struggle to the death, rather than secular political...cont'd

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/others/world-order.html