Reconstruction
An inquiry into the roots of any war will show that they all have much in common. For instance, a common criticism of the Iraq War is that the explanation for it started out being about one thing and ended up having goals we never signed on to.
In fact, browsing through history books convinces me that the Bush Administration's publicly stated goals at the beginning of the Iraq War remain much more consistent with the post-war reality than typically is the case.
A quibble with the Mother Country over a petty tax of three pence a pound on tea becomes the birth of a nation. A boundary dispute with Mexico over a few square miles of Texas scrub becomes a land-grab of a third of a continent and keeps the valuable port of San Francisco from defaulting to British hands. A dispute with Germany over unrestricted submarine warfare becomes "making the world safe for democracy."
The reverse also is true. What seems, after the fact, to be the great justification for a war turns out to be something that did not figure among the stated reasons for starting it. Study World War II today and you'll get a big unit on the Holocaust. How odd, then, to discover it played no part in the justification for the war at the time. Lincoln freed the slaves. But the American Civil War began as an constitutional chess match and an attempt to enforce U.S. authority in certain forts and arsenals, and to collect the tariff in Southern ports. Lincoln publicly disavowed any intention to free a single slave.
By comparison, this was one of our more "honest" wars.
Now of course, all these ultimate outcomes were in the minds of somebody somewhere in a place of power at the time the wars began. Certainly the more radical American revolutionaries were angling for independence from the first bullet. But to draw the bulk of the country they needed to hold John Dickinson and the other moderates on the platform by making a general appeal to the rights of British citizens (as most Americans still felt themselves to be). I have no doubt Lincoln desired to see slavery ended (and the free blacks shipped off to Santo Domingo), but he knew the average Northerner never would fight in that crusade, and in fact the Southern secession presented an immediate economic and political crisis that forced his hand in spite of his personal philosophy.
All wars are so much alike that to compare them in detail sheds but little light. Still, a little familiarity with history does disabuse one of the sort of sham shock some people seem to feel on entering a war down one hole and coming out another. What? You mean the causus belli wasn't ironclad?
One parallel that keeps coming back to me, though, in the run-up to the Iraqi election, is beteween the post-war situation in the U.S. South in the late 1860s and in Iraq today.
"Reconstruction" in the old Confederacy was not only America's first experiment in "nation-building," it produced by way of backlash the first modern paramilitary uprising.
There is a rough parallel in the combination, on the one side, of a self-interested "foreign" power and a long-repressed native ethnic group (a majority in much of the region). They find themselves opposed by die-hard elements of the old regime and the bitter among the dispossessed former dominant group. (A missing component in the 1860s version is the foreign interlopers.)
The "resistance" in the old South was diverse, and fought for diverse reasons. Many of the up-country farmers of Georgia and the Carolinas who had fought to stay out of the Confederacy and hid from its conscripton agents now joined the Ku Klux Klan and battled U.S. federal authorities.
The benevolent intentions of the occupiers were clouded by plausible allegations of greed and self-interest. The carpetbagger governments opened up hundreds of miles of railroads in the South. Yet the railroads, financed by state taxes, did little good to the average Southerner, white or black, and lined the pockets of the railway bond investors -- Northern capitalists -- and Northern iron-mongers, who were the big corporations of the day.
The insurgent reaction against this rarely confronted the occupying army. Instead, it practiced political intimidation aimed in part at the more vulnerable civilian aspect of the occupying forces, but also at locals who cooperated with them and at the newly liberated slaves. Its tactics were terror, kidnapping, murder, voter intimidation, and anything that would sow a climate of fear.
The Grant administration never really got a handle on them, despite some local successes. Even after the official disbanding of the Klan in 1869, resistance continued under other names.
If this is a parallel situation, the outcome in the 1870s doesn't offer a great deal of hope for modern proponents of a free and democratic Iraq. Northerners soon grew weary of the expense and frustration and embarrassment of their "bayonet rule" over the South. The political winds shifted, and economic woes distracted the people and made the crusade for black freedom seem a waste of resources.
By 1873, leading Republican newspapers in the North were ready to wash their hands of the whole deal: "People are becoming tired of ... abstract questions, in which the overwhelming majority of them have no direct interest. The negro question, with all its complications, and the Reconstruction of the Southern States, with all its interminable embroilments, have lost much of the power they once wielded."
The national government quietly turned its back on Reconstruction, then the Republicans all but repudiated it in the Compromise of 1877, a raw political deal that seceded a broken and impoverished South back to its old masters in exchange for Republican control of the White House.
"Four years of conventional warfare during the Civil War had lost white Southerners their political independence," historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel wrote, "but an average of six years of low-level unconventional warfare during Reconstruction, off and on depending on the state, had regained them their political autonomy. Northern Republicans gave up any further effort to protect the freedmen."
Yet the parallel need not be pushed too far. The Kurds and Shiites in Iraq are not the helpless minority the freedmen were in much of the old South. They have a leadership that appears up to the challenge of politics, and a people willing and able to work the machinery of democracy.
And the price of failure in this case is not an uncomfortable political compromise. The Ku Klux Klan sought to subvert free elections. The Islamists who covet Iraq seek to blow them to smithereens.
In fact, browsing through history books convinces me that the Bush Administration's publicly stated goals at the beginning of the Iraq War remain much more consistent with the post-war reality than typically is the case.
A quibble with the Mother Country over a petty tax of three pence a pound on tea becomes the birth of a nation. A boundary dispute with Mexico over a few square miles of Texas scrub becomes a land-grab of a third of a continent and keeps the valuable port of San Francisco from defaulting to British hands. A dispute with Germany over unrestricted submarine warfare becomes "making the world safe for democracy."
The reverse also is true. What seems, after the fact, to be the great justification for a war turns out to be something that did not figure among the stated reasons for starting it. Study World War II today and you'll get a big unit on the Holocaust. How odd, then, to discover it played no part in the justification for the war at the time. Lincoln freed the slaves. But the American Civil War began as an constitutional chess match and an attempt to enforce U.S. authority in certain forts and arsenals, and to collect the tariff in Southern ports. Lincoln publicly disavowed any intention to free a single slave.
By comparison, this was one of our more "honest" wars.
Now of course, all these ultimate outcomes were in the minds of somebody somewhere in a place of power at the time the wars began. Certainly the more radical American revolutionaries were angling for independence from the first bullet. But to draw the bulk of the country they needed to hold John Dickinson and the other moderates on the platform by making a general appeal to the rights of British citizens (as most Americans still felt themselves to be). I have no doubt Lincoln desired to see slavery ended (and the free blacks shipped off to Santo Domingo), but he knew the average Northerner never would fight in that crusade, and in fact the Southern secession presented an immediate economic and political crisis that forced his hand in spite of his personal philosophy.
All wars are so much alike that to compare them in detail sheds but little light. Still, a little familiarity with history does disabuse one of the sort of sham shock some people seem to feel on entering a war down one hole and coming out another. What? You mean the causus belli wasn't ironclad?
One parallel that keeps coming back to me, though, in the run-up to the Iraqi election, is beteween the post-war situation in the U.S. South in the late 1860s and in Iraq today.
"Reconstruction" in the old Confederacy was not only America's first experiment in "nation-building," it produced by way of backlash the first modern paramilitary uprising.
There is a rough parallel in the combination, on the one side, of a self-interested "foreign" power and a long-repressed native ethnic group (a majority in much of the region). They find themselves opposed by die-hard elements of the old regime and the bitter among the dispossessed former dominant group. (A missing component in the 1860s version is the foreign interlopers.)
The "resistance" in the old South was diverse, and fought for diverse reasons. Many of the up-country farmers of Georgia and the Carolinas who had fought to stay out of the Confederacy and hid from its conscripton agents now joined the Ku Klux Klan and battled U.S. federal authorities.
The benevolent intentions of the occupiers were clouded by plausible allegations of greed and self-interest. The carpetbagger governments opened up hundreds of miles of railroads in the South. Yet the railroads, financed by state taxes, did little good to the average Southerner, white or black, and lined the pockets of the railway bond investors -- Northern capitalists -- and Northern iron-mongers, who were the big corporations of the day.
The insurgent reaction against this rarely confronted the occupying army. Instead, it practiced political intimidation aimed in part at the more vulnerable civilian aspect of the occupying forces, but also at locals who cooperated with them and at the newly liberated slaves. Its tactics were terror, kidnapping, murder, voter intimidation, and anything that would sow a climate of fear.
The Grant administration never really got a handle on them, despite some local successes. Even after the official disbanding of the Klan in 1869, resistance continued under other names.
If this is a parallel situation, the outcome in the 1870s doesn't offer a great deal of hope for modern proponents of a free and democratic Iraq. Northerners soon grew weary of the expense and frustration and embarrassment of their "bayonet rule" over the South. The political winds shifted, and economic woes distracted the people and made the crusade for black freedom seem a waste of resources.
By 1873, leading Republican newspapers in the North were ready to wash their hands of the whole deal: "People are becoming tired of ... abstract questions, in which the overwhelming majority of them have no direct interest. The negro question, with all its complications, and the Reconstruction of the Southern States, with all its interminable embroilments, have lost much of the power they once wielded."
The national government quietly turned its back on Reconstruction, then the Republicans all but repudiated it in the Compromise of 1877, a raw political deal that seceded a broken and impoverished South back to its old masters in exchange for Republican control of the White House.
"Four years of conventional warfare during the Civil War had lost white Southerners their political independence," historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel wrote, "but an average of six years of low-level unconventional warfare during Reconstruction, off and on depending on the state, had regained them their political autonomy. Northern Republicans gave up any further effort to protect the freedmen."
Yet the parallel need not be pushed too far. The Kurds and Shiites in Iraq are not the helpless minority the freedmen were in much of the old South. They have a leadership that appears up to the challenge of politics, and a people willing and able to work the machinery of democracy.
And the price of failure in this case is not an uncomfortable political compromise. The Ku Klux Klan sought to subvert free elections. The Islamists who covet Iraq seek to blow them to smithereens.
Labels: anti-war, history, Reconstruction
