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April 13, 2004
Americans have short attention spans
Some people have been asking for benchmarks or metrics for how the Iraq occupation/liberation is going. This is reasonable, and many mertics have been offered. (If I can find the URLs among the hundreds of bookmarks I've been piling up, I'll post them in an update.)But here's one: When was the last time the US occupied and rebuilt a vanquished enemy country? WWII: Germany and Japan. So compared to the German occupation, how are we doing? Worse in some ways: There was Nazi resistance after the end of the war, but not on the scale we are fighting now. But better in many ways: Here's what the remnants of the German infrastructure was like, and what the population had to put up with in 1946. Read the details, but here's the punchline:
It took 4 years from the end of hostilities to start the turnaround of the German economy.Iraq is going to be three steps forward, one step back. To expect anything else is unrealistic.We started to implement a plan that would have turned Germany into Southern France, and turned 180 degrees and helped Germany reindistrialize.
That's how things work in the real world. They progress in fits and starts, change and turn, and most of all, they take time.
The forces that oppose us are convinced that they are more patient than we are. They are convinced that if things in Iraq aren't perfect - if the power isn't on and unemployment ended and all the Iraqi women listening to NPR by September - well, it'll be a quagmire then. And then what'll we do?
Dean Atcheson and George Marshall were probably worried about quagmire as well. But they simply put their heads down and worked, and experimented, and tried things until - at the end of the day - they outlasted the problem.
Judith | 04/13/04 at 09:18 PM | Categories: - Nation-building
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