On the Margins of War

In “Poisoned Peace,” his book on the end of the Second World War, Gregor Dallas writes about the “margins” which accompanied the allied forces as they advanced into the countries occupied by Hitler. The margin that preceded the liberating armies (though true liberation was, of course, the last thing on Stalin’s mind) comprised the indigenous resistance forces, such as the Home Army in Poland and De Gaulle’s National Council of Resistance. These quasi-armies had sprung up soon after their respective countries were occupied, but their activities were mainly low-level, hit-and-run affairs until just before the arrival of the Soviet or Western forces. At that point, when it was clear that the Germans were on their way out, full-scale uprisings erupted in many of the occupied countries.

The margin that followed in the wake of the liberating armies was a period of chaos: haphazard violence and looting, revenge attacks on collaborators and internecine warfare between ethnic and political groups. The latter, exacerbated by the undeclared but increasingly obvious intention of the Soviet Union to control all the territories its armies passed through, to a large extent determined the map of Europe until the fall of communism in the early Nineties. The most far-reaching result of World War II, other than the overthrow of Nazism, was the forced transfer of much of Eastern Europe into the Soviet orbit and the strengthening of Communist movements in the countries of Western Europe, from Greece to France.

Interestingly, the occupation of Germany itself was not preceded by a margin of resistance activities. That could be attributed, if only partly, to the sheer brutality with which the Nazi regime dealt with the July 20 conspirators up to and including those on the furthest fringes of the conservative military revolt. That, plus the penchant of the retreating Nazis to hang both military personnel and civilians at the least sign of defeatism, put paid to any further thought of resistance, even as the Soviet forces converged on Berlin and the Western allies occupied the country’s industrial heartland.

Another reason was given by Field Marshall Montgomery in an order of the day to his troops. Crossing the German frontier would be entirely different from entering into France, Belgium or Holland, Montgomery said. The allies would not be seen as liberators but as invaders. Even after the horrors of the war precipitated by the Nazi regime, Germans would not take kindly to the invasion of German territory.

That was then. What struck me, while reading Dallas’ fascinating book, was the thought that the invasion of Iraq has been accompanied by its own margins and it is of interest (if not more than that) to reflect to what extent they were taken into account by the war planners in the Bush Administration.

As in the case of Nazi Germany, there was very little internal resistance to the Saddam Hussein regime, a consequence no doubt of the regime’s viciousness in putting down the revolt of the Shiites following the first Gulf War as well as its gassing of the Kurds. Thus, the entry of the invasion forces was not accompanied by an Iraqi resistance uprising – and nor was such an uprising anticipated by the Americans, to the best of my knowledge. What they did expect, though, was a rapturous reception by the downtrodden civilians (showers of petals, if my memory of Paul Wolfowitz’s statements doesn’t fail me) and for a while it seemed as if they just might get it. But the tearing down of Saddam’s statue was as good as it got. From then and until today, the Americans have been contending with the other margin, the chaos in the wake of the invasion.

First came the looting - of the national museum, of hospitals and of private property – followed by revenge attacks on Baathists (with the benign neglect, if not connivance, of Paul Bremmer’s administration. Then, and most ominously, came the internecine warfare. Replace communist cadres with Islamic fundamentalists and you have a reasonably accurate facsimile of the events in the Balkans and the Baltic states in 1945 and 1946. The overthrow of tyranny was accompanied by the unwelcome invasion of sovereign territory and the machinations of an unscrupulous group with its eyes on the world stage. Like Stalin in the last year of the war, Bin Laden, Zarqawi and the other amorphous Islamic fundamentalist leaders saw the opportunity and took it.

Whatever good the invasion of Iraq was intended to bring (and that is another discussion,) it has resulted in a virtual civil was between Sunnis and Shiites and has provided radical Islam with a windfall it could never have dreamed of when it lost its power base in Afghanistan. In circumstances eerily similar to those that lead to the communist-inspired civil war in Greece after the defeat of the Germans, fundamentalist Islam is taking advantage of the anarchy provoked by the American invasion to advance its own agenda. Greece was saved from Communism by the timely and tough intervention of British forces; the Americans at the time were curiously disinterested in the Communist encroachment in Europe.

The invasion of Iraq was similarly, inexcusably blind. If the so-called War on Terror was indeed at the forefront of its strategy, the Bush Administration should have had the historical awareness to understand that the invasion of a sovereign state in the heart of the Middle East with inadequate forces and minimal world backing would be more likely to serve the interests of the enemy than its own. But America, dazzled by its own strength and omnipotence, has never been good at learning from history.