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Jonathan Friendly is the national editor of , which owns the weekly Jewish newspapers in Detroit and Atlanta. He is a former journalism professor at the University of Michigan and a former reporter and editor at The New York Times.
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By Jonathan Friendly
February 16, 2003
The Bush Administration has strengthened its case for going to war to unseat Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, though it is still some distance from proving that invasion is the only effective way to make him disarm permanently. Still, with a war increasingly likely, America and the rest of the world need to think about how to conduct an extended occupation of the country following military success.
Analysts who are persuaded that occupation can succeed generally cite the happy U.S. experience in Germany and Japan following World War II; the pessimists urge comparisons with our disappointments in the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and, of course, Vietnam.
More to the point would be a comparison rooted in the Mideast, specifically Israel's two-decades-long effort to hold a portion of southern Lebanon and its 35 years of experience in the West Bank and Gaza.
The Lebanon venture ended badly. When Israel withdrew nearly three years ago, it left the 20-mile wide swath of what had been a buffer zone in the hands of a sworn enemy, Hezbollah, and much of Lebanon under the influence of another enemy, Syria. The investment of lives and time bought some temporary stability for Israel's north, but no permanent improvement in security nor any dramatic shift toward a more open, democratic and stable Lebanon. In limiting its aims, Israel limited its results.
The verdict on the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is still out. Holding the territory after 1967 was vital to Israel's defenses in the subsequent wars with the Arabs, but with the 1991 Oslo agreements the process took on a new goal, the creation of a modern and democratic state - the same ambition that the U.S. says it has for Iraq.
Despite the horrors of the last two years of Intifada and the destruction of the Oslo process, despite the realization that some Palestinian factions squandered the opportunity by teaching hatred, despite the rampant corruption that funneled hundreds of millions of Western aid into private pockets, that ambition must continue because it is the only solution that will permit a stable Mideast with a secure Israel.
If the United Nations, led by America, learns from Israel's experience, it will not leave Iraq just because its security concerns have been met by the destruction of Hussein's chemical and biological weapons and his plants for building nuclear weapons. From the beginning, the U.N. and particularly the U.S. must be committed to staying until they can see in place a stable economic and political system that will bring a measurably better life for the vast majority of Iraqis.
A smart world will learn that it must closely supervise whomever it puts in place in Baghdad after Saddam. It will have to monitor what the schools teach, where the aid money goes and which police forces get armed with what weapons. It will have to make sure that the money from Iraqi oil sales gets plowed back into building roads and hospitals and homes rather than into buying arms for Islamist factions seeking to rule as the Taliban did in Afghanistan.
A lot of responsible Palestinians have come to understand both that Israel is not going to be driven into the sea and that their Palestinian nation-to-be cannot succeed if it clings to the pattern of tyranny, corruption and backwardness that marks so much of Arab life. If we are attentive to the lessons of the West Bank and Gaza, it won't take a third of a century to impress that reality on the next generation of Iraqis.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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