The central debate for ending the occupation of Iraq is: What happens if we leave?
We know what the Bush Administration thinks.
Neither an immediate nor phased withdrawal would confer any protection on the United States, Cheney said. "If we pull out, they'll follow us," he said of terrorists.
Most conservative media sources seem to accept this reasoning. But does it have any basis in reality?
The simple fact of the matter is that not a single person in the world knows for certain how things will play out when we withdraw. There are too many variables to know for certain.
But one thing is certain beyond a shadow of a doubt: We will eventually leave Iraq.
"If we allow them to do this, if we retreat from Iraq, if we don't uphold our duty to support those who are desirous to live in liberty, 50 years from now history will look back on our time with unforgiving clarity, and demand to know why we did not act."
- George W. Bush
There is little chance that the fighting in Iraq will entirely cease before we withdraw, even if the Bush Administration's plan have some success (which seems unlikely at this point). So the concept of withdrawing before Iraq is a peaceful state will eventually become our reality no matter how long we put it off.
Even though it is impossible to say precisely what will happen when we leave Iraq, there are some historic examples that can give us an idea of what we can expect. I would like to examine a few of them so see what we can learn. I've set up some criteria so that they will more closely resemble our situation. They are:
- a country that has undergone a foreign occupation and whose native resistance contributed to the end of the occupation
- a country with a large muslim population
- a country with a history of ethnic strife and whose borders were drawn with no concern for the diverse ethnic groups
- a historically modern example
Given that criteria I have four examples to chose from. One of the examples, Afghanistan 1979 - 1989, I'm not going to address because America currently occupies that nation. Another example, Lebanon 1982 - 2000, I'm not going to address simply because of the immense size of this diary (and also because of the inevitable flames I would receive from the pro-Israeli crowd).
Therefore my two remaining examples are:
a) Algeria War of Independence: 1954 - 1962
b) Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia: 1941 - 1945
"All modern wars start in the history classroom."
- Anonymous
"We learn from history that we never learn anything from history."
- Hegel
Bleeding Yugoslavia
The most horrific of these examples is Yugoslavia. How many people died during the Nazi occupation is impossible to say, but estimates range from 1 million to 1.7 million. This war saw not just genocide and guerrilla warfare, but a plethora of terrorist attacks. In fact, the Nazis at one point tried to outlaw bicycles because so many of them were being used for bombings.
Like Iraq, Yugoslavia was artificially put together by the victorious allies after WWI, and combined several ethnic groups that had long, hostile relationships. They managed to live together for decades until Hitler decided that he didn't like their current government in April, 1941. Hitler invaded for no other reason than he wanted "regime change". Yugoslavia's army collapsed quickly. However, that was merely the beginning.
Hitler did not have enough troops available to contain any outbreak of ethnic strife, and Yugoslavia descended into civil war.
The Nazis had a policy: for every German soldier killed, 100 innocent civilians would be executed. For every German soldier wounded, 50 innocent civilians would be executed. Nevertheless, the Yugoslav National Liberation Army (NOV), led by Josip Broz Tito, still managed to drive the Germans out of Serbia by 1944, and most of Yugoslavia before the Red Army arrived.
Tito
During the occupation there was more than one resistance organization (primarily the Communist Partisans and the Royalist Chetniks), which led to open fighting at times. More importantly, there was an entire major ethnic group that worked with the Nazis: the Croatian Ustase. To make matters worse, they were even more aggressive about ethnic cleansing than the Nazis were.
In Croatia [in 1941] the indeginous fascist regime set about a policy of "racial purification" that went beyond even Nazi practices. Minority groups such as Jews and Gypsies were to be eliminated as were the Serbs: it was declared that one-third of the Serbian population would be deported, one-third converted to Roman Catholicism, and one third liquidated.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th Edition
The Ustase was so enthusiastic in their ethnic cleansing against the Serbs, jews, muslims, and other minorities that even the Nazi occupiers (of all people) took steps to reign them in, including shutting down a death camp at Jasenovac.
Children at Jasenovac
In the end, three times as many people died in Yugoslavia during WWII as died in the Yugoslavian civil war in the 1990's. The trigger was the overthrow of the government without the military force to enforce its will on an ethnically diverse people. Republicans learned the wrong lesson from history. Saddam Hussein wasn't Hitler. Saddam was King Peter II.
Well, not really. But you get the idea.
So what happened after the Nazis withdrew from Yugoslavia? Did the nation descend into civil war? No. Although the Ustase continued to fight for years after Germany's surrender (and committed terrorist attacks up to the 1970's, some taking place in the United States), there was no serious effort at breaking up Yugoslavia along ethnic lines.
Did the victorious communists, many of whom were Serbian, slaughter the Croats? Yes. The infamous Bleiburg Massacre was one of the largest in WWII, and it happened shortly after the war ended. Ustase members and their families fled towards Austria in order to surrender to the British. The British refused and handed them back to the Partisans. All told some 50,000 Croatians were killed there, or in the death march that followed. A few of the most notorious Ustase members were hunted down, but there was no case of random genocide against the Croatian people (unlike what happened to the Serbian people).
The leader of the Ustase, Ante Paveli, was smuggled out of Europe to Argentina by the Roman Catholic Church. Why did they do this? Because the Croatians were Roman Catholic while the Serbians were Eastern Orthodox. That seems like a very small difference until you consider how small the differences are between Shia and Sunni.
What happened afterwards was that Yugoslavia wrote a new constitution and tried to put the horrors of its war behind them. Yugoslavia enjoyed stability and peace. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the growth of Yugoslavia's gross domestic product averaged 6.1%. There was 91% literacy and an average life expectancy of 72 years.
Simply put, the fighting, even the sectarian violence, largely ended shortly after the occupation did. What didn't happen was the partisans following the retreating Nazis back to Germany to attack them there.
Algeria
King Charles X launched the invasion of Algeria in June of 1830 largely to distract the public and rally domestic support for his faltering regime. While the initial invasion succeeded, his plan failed. He was deposed in the Three Glorious Days in July of that year.
The new government, composed of liberal opponents of the Algiers expedition, was reluctant to pursue the conquest ordered by the old regime, but withdrawing from Algeria proved more difficult than conquering it. A parliamentary commission that examined the Algerian situation concluded that although French policy, behaviour, and organization were failures, the occupation should continue for the sake of national prestige.
"All populations which do not accept our conditions must be despoiled. Everything must be seized, devastated, without age or sex distinction: grass must not grow any more where the French army has put the foot. Who wants the end wants the means, whatever may say our philanthropists. I personally warn all good militaries which I have the honour to lead that if they happen to bring me a living Arab, they will receive a beating with the flat of the saber... This is how, my dear friend, we must do war against Arabs: kill all men over the age of fifteen, take all their women and children, charged the buildings with them, send them to the Marquesas Islands or elsewhere. In one word, annihilate all that will not crawl beneath our feet like dogs."
- Lieutenant-Colonel de Montagnac wrote on 15 March 1843
Needless to say, the conquest of Algeria was bloody and long. A guerrilla resistance group rose up to oppose the French until it was crushed in 1843. A massive land grab by French colonialists followed. The majority muslim population lived in an impoverished, semi-apartheid condition for the next century.
On November 1, 1954, Algeria's War of Independence began with attacks on military outposts and police stations. Early on two rebel groups, the FLN and the MNA fought a deadly war against one another for leadership of the revolution. This became known as the cafe war because so many of the murders and bombings happened in cafes. Athough exploited by the French, factionalism never seemed to hamper the rebellion. Moderates who cooperated with the French were also killed. Eventually the FLN began attacking french colonist civilians. This led to an overreaction by the French military which massacred thousands of innocent muslims. Until this point the rebellion had limited sympathy from the general population. But the massacres by the French military swung public opinion.
Terrorism by the FLN was met by terrorism from the French authorities. The French even developed a group called the Organization of the French Algerian Resistance. Their job was to carry out false flag terrorist attacks with the aim of quashing any hopes of political compromise. Both sides infiltrated the other side.
Writer Albert Camus, a Pied-Noir and philosopher tried unsuccessfully to persuade both sides to at least leave civilians alone, writing editorials against the use of torture. The FLN considered him a fool, and most French colonists considered him a traitor.
By 1958 the political situation had overtaken the military. The military was unhappy by what it considered a lack of support against the rebellion. An army junta seized power in Algeria and began making plans a coup d'etat in Paris. The election of Charles de Gaulle just 15 hours before the planned coup averted that scenario.
Charles de Gaulle began rolling back the apartheid laws that had been in place for a century. It was at this point that France almost won the war, as the French military had almost won control of Algeria (at an enormous cost in human right violations), but the support of the French public was fading.
In reaction to the negative public opinion, de Gaulle uttered the words "self determination" for the first time. The French colonists responded by inciting an insurrection in Algiers, falsely assuming that the military would support them. De Gaulle used this to make his policy of Algerian self-determination official. The colonists organized the Organisation de l'armée secrète (OAS) to fight the French government to prevent Algerian independence. They used assassination and hundreds of bombings (which it tried to blame on the FLN), which culminated in an assassination attempt on de Gaulle himself in 1962.
While 91% of the French people supported Algerian self-determination (and voted that way), the French army opposed it. On April 22, 1961, there was another, more serious coup in Algeria by professional generals, but it fell apart when conscripted soldiers failed to support it.
In October 1961, Parisian police conducted raids against suspected Algerian terrorists who were targeting the police. However, the sweeps were aimed at ethnic groups, rather than something based on solid leads. This prompted a mass demonstration on October 17th. The police responded by shooting at the unarmed demonstrators, killing many. They chased the remaining demonstrators back to the Neuilly Bridge where countless demonstrators were beaten unconscious before being thrown into the River Seine. It is unknown how many people were killed, but estimates range upwards to 200. The media, both in France and America, predictably echoed the official story that only two people died, and they were both terrorists.
On February 8, 1962, the police killed another nine peaceful demonstrators at the Charonne metro station.
On July 3, 1962, Algeria officially became independent. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 million Algerians died during this war.
Despite the Evian Accords promising the safety of the French colonists, the new Algerian government showed little effort to honor the agreement. The OAS's campaign of terror against muslims in 1962 didn't help matters. A massacre of 95 people at Oran shortly after independence was all that was needed to hasten a panicked flight to France. Of over a million Pied-noir in Algeria in 1961, all but 100,000 had left Algeria within a year. Most of those remaining left over the next few decades. However, there was no large scale killings of this group following the war.
The Harkis, arabs that had fought for the French, weren't so lucky. They were considered traitors but the majority population, and estimates of 50,000 to 150,000 were killed by lynch mobs.
What is notable was Algerian terrorist attacks, while common in Paris during the war (mostly against the police), largely failed to happen after the war was over. In other words, they didn't follow the French back to Paris.
What does that mean to me?
So where does that leave us?
Based on the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, America's experience in Vietnam, and the French experience in Algeria, the public's stomach for war generally sours after four or five years. By the sixth year the public is clamoring for a end to the killing.
We started pulling troops out of Vietnam in 1970, six years after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Charles de Gaulle first uttered the words "self determination" in 1960, six years after the War of Independence started. Gorbachev was looking for ways to get out of Afghanistan as soon as he took office in 1985, six years after the Soviet Union invaded.
And to the possible surprise of the war hawks, human rights violations committed by the troops does matter to the general public. Wars of occupation almost always end ugly, yet the public has to be reminded of this over and over again.
Was the resistance to the Iraq occupation predictable? Anyone who had ever studied the History of Iraq could tell you that Iraq had an emerging national identity going all the way back to 1948. That identity was solidified with the brutal Iran-Iraq War of the 1980's. We are fighting nationalists, and the longer it goes on the stronger they get. Like every resistance movement ever fought, including our own American Revolution, they don't have to defeat us, they just have to avoid losing.
As for what happens after we leave, that is a good question. Judging by historical evidence, Cheney's prediction that they will follow us back to America rings hollow. It's not like America has never occupied countries before, yet never has our leaving ever meant terrorism at home. Nor has it meant terrorism at home for other nations either.
And why should it? They will have their pyrrhic victory and their primary interests will involve a power vacuum in Iraq.
There is some danger if you still border the nation you occupied. Israel's border with Lebanon is still not peaceful. The Soviet Union saw a couple border raids from Afghanistan before 1991. But there was never any significant domestic terrorism caused by their withdraw, only by their continued occupations (of Palestine and Chechnya respectively).
Sure, there is always a first time. There is always someone who will claim that "this time is different", but then that has been claimed a million times in human history and it was wrong every single time.
Will our leaving mean the sectarian violence spread to other nations? The "domino theory" has been used again and again going all the way back to the Spanish Empire of the 16th Century, and made infamous by the pro-Vietnam War crowd. It has been almost always wrong. The only real danger of sectarian violence spreading, as judged by Iraqi history, is our allies in Iraq - the Kurds. We should be spending more time watching the Turks than the Iranians.
What will happen in Iraq after we leave? No one knows for certain, but you can bet on two things:
1) Things won't go well for the Iraqis that worked with the American forces. That seems to be a consistent theme in history. People that collaborate with the occupying forces face a bleak future when the occupying army leaves.
Most likely we will be seeing the pitiful plight of refugees on the nightly news asking why America betrayed them, and reports of lynchings and small-scale massacres. We probably will see heads of the puppet government we leave being assassinated.
It won't be pretty.
- Once the revenge killings are done, Iraq will actually find itself at peace. Given actually responsibility, rather than being puppets, Iraqis will actually prove that they can run their own country, that they can actually provide their own security.
The pro-war crowd openly wonders why the Iraqis "can't get it together". The answer is so obvious that it is staring them right in the face: The primary political incentive in Iraq is to position yourself for the power vacuum that will happen after America withdraws. There is little incentive to fix a broke system that was set up to benefit foreign companies, and will almost surely be restructured in the next four years. To put it simply, after we leave it will be bad, probably not much worse than if we stay, but it will eventually lead to peace.