On the way home tonight I started thinking about how the current occupation of Iraq compares to the occupation of Japan after WWII. We successfully imposed democracy on that nation, why are we failing to force it on this one? Did we lose the instruction manual? Obviously there’s no real way to compare Iraq of 2003 with Japan of 1945 - Japan had actually attacked us, and we were in a potentially ruinous all-out war with an entire nation of people. Iraq hadn’t attacked us, nobody in Iraq really believed we were going to invade, and the people with the guns were a minority sect that had been oppressing the rest of the country for years.
However, I still think its interesting (and instructive) to compare the current situation to that other (more successful) US occupation…

This is a personal journal, not an academic journal. For real research leads on the occupation of Japan go here.

When the US occupied Japan (in 1945), they did so with 350,000 troops (plus 40,000 British, Aussies and New Zealanders). The island of Japan had been hammered by constant US bombardment, their people were starving, but war strategists of the time estimated that Japan might be able to muster 3,500,000 troops to defend the homeland. Based on the ‘Saipan ratio’ (”it cost approximately one American killed and several wounded to exterminate seven Japanese soldiers”) we could have conceivably lost 2 million lives if we had been forced to invade, so atomic bombs were dropped to eliminate two entire Japanese cities (and 200,000 Japanese). Luckily for us it worked, as we only had the two bombs. The area of Japan is 377,835 sq. km. The population of japan in 1945 was 72,000,000. The US proceeded in an orderly way to hang or jail the Japanese ‘war criminals’ (formerly known as the wartime leaders of Japan) and groomed Junior officers to be the next politicos. The Americans set up a food network which provided $1 million dollars a day in food aid to the Japanese people suffering from from starvation after the bombardment of their cities. General MacArthur had ‘immediately decreed several laws at the start of the occupation: No Allied personnel were to assault Japanese people. No Allied personnel were to eat the scarce Japanese food’ [Wikipedia]. The Americans imposed disarmament - the Japanese couldn’t have an army. A major land redistribution effort was waged - giving land from nobility to farmers. The Americans *wrote* the Constitution, giving women the right to vote and abolishing Shinto as an official state religion (try separating religion and politics in Iraq!).

The invasion of Iraq commenced in 2003 with about 265,000 troops if we count all the support personnel and the entire ‘coalition of the willing’. The International Institute for Strategic Studies estimated the Iraqi armed forces to number 389,000. The area of Iraq is only slightly larger than Japan at 437,072 sq. km. The population of Iraq in 2006 is estimated at about 26,000,000. Currently there are only 162,000 regular American troops, 20,000 UK soldiers, and about 50,000 contractors in Iraq. The US did not secure the peace as the occupation ensued, there was uncontrolled looting (or as Rumsfeld so eloquently put it, people doing bad things because they were ‘free’ to do so). The US disbanded the entire Iraqi military, and chose not to use them to impose order, many of these disaffected officers having no other options, ended up fighting in a resistance effort against the US. The lack of security in the country has led to a failed reconstruction. Sabotage of the electrical grid and water supply systems, vandalism of new construction and murders of construction contractors (almost 600 deaths according to SIGIR), misappropriation of reconstruction funds and general mismanagement has led to a call for fresh oversight by the new Democratically led Congress this week. Armed militias roam the country. Police, seemingly loyal only to their religious leaders use their uniforms and American weapons to hunt and murder members of the minority sect. Religion and religious leaders rule their gangs and fight for turf. An utterly embarrassing and disgraceful waste of American prestige, treasure and blood.

I think the answer is that we didn’t immediately impose order and securityon Iraq which are the primary requirements for a successful occupation. We didn’t immediately assuage the civilians who we needed to keep on our side. We didn’t disarm the population and impose martial law. We didn’t forcefully impose a new secular order (a requirement of our form of democracy) as we did in Japan. We didn’t redistribute wealth from the Sunnis to the Shias in an orderly fashion, and instead left that transfer to the religious gangs who have settled things using bloody means. GW didn’t do his homework, and was misled into thinking we could occupy a country on the cheap by a group of business interests who would make money either way.