What the American Civil War can inform us about Iraq

[housewolf]

What the American Civil War can inform us about Iraq

By David Ignatius
Daily Star staff
Thursday, May 05, 2005

The most famous battlefield of the American Civil War might seem an unlikely place to look for lessons about Iraq. But as historian James McPherson led a group of Pentagon officials in a discussion of postwar reconstruction, some startling common themes emerged.

Pentagon officials gathered in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, last weekend for a conference on "Transition from Crisis." ... this session was about how to rebuild societies, rather than defeat them militarily. It was former Secretary of State Colin Powell's famous "Pottery Barn Rule," revisited: You broke it, and now you own it. So how do you put it back together?

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The Civil War, like the invasion of Iraq, was a war of transformation where the victors hoped to reshape the political culture of the vanquished. But as McPherson tells the story, reconstruction posed severe and unexpected tests: The occupying Union army was harassed by an insurgency that fused die-hard remnants of the old plantation power structure with irregular guerrillas. The Union was as unprepared for this struggle as was the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad in 2003. The army of occupation was too small, and its local allies were often corrupt and disorganized.

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Along with the Ku Klux Klan, there were underground groups such as "The White Brotherhood" and "The Knights of the White Camellia," determined to preserve the old regime's power. White insurgents staged bloody riots in Memphis and New Orleans in 1866. ... "It was a matrix of lawlessness,"

The poison that destroyed Reconstruction was racial hatred. The white elite managed to convince poor whites that newly freed blacks were their enemies, rather than potential allies. There's an obvious analogy to the Sunni-Shiite divide that has poisoned postwar Iraq. In the South, the die-hard whites began to believe that if they held tough, the North would eventually abandon the campaign to create a new, multiracial South. And it turned out they were right.

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... What lessons does this dismal history convey for American forces in Iraq? ...

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more...
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=14804#

[eridani]

1. Interesting

Looks like what happened is that the North couldn't financially afford to remake the South, which is probably what is going to happen to our endeavor in Iraq.