Sunday, May 11, 2008
Opinion

Iraq: It’s West Berlin, not Vietnam

 

Philosophy students celebrate graduation from Mustansiryah University in Baghdad on May 7.
ALI AL-SAADI/AFP/Getty Images
By Stephanie Ramage

I extend a heartfelt “Welcome Home!” to the 3,500 Georgia soldiers who are returning from Iraq and reacquainting themselves with their families. But lest there be any doubt regarding my position on Iraq, I will restate it: I still support the American occupation of Iraq.

Some readers wonder how I can be immune to the marches and vigils protesting the war, those misguided but well-intended exercises meant to stir a passionate nostalgia for the Vietnam War era for those who are far too young to have been alive at the time, those who feel that they weren’t old enough to make such a groovy era their own, or those who, through age or sentimentality, see the Iraq War as an encore of the Vietnam War of their gilded youth.

I realize Vietnam is “cool,” with all its contemporary film footage and its enshrinement in our nation’s cultural temple, Hollywood, and its stockroom of classic song lyrics by Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen and Steve Earle, but this is not that war. If you’re looking for a historical precedent for this war, there is a far more accurate one.

The Iraq war is an occupation of a country that has been largely destroyed, one that has been almost entirely stripped of its ability to support itself, and is just beginning to heal from an utterly dehumanizing ordeal, just like the American occupation of the western sector of Berlin from 1945 to 1949. June 24 will mark the 60th anniversary of that occupation’s darkest hour, the beginning of the Soviet blockade of Berlin.

In his magnificent and exhaustively researched book, “The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America’s Finest Hour,” Andrei Cherny describes the situation that greeted Marietta native Gen. Lucius Clay, whose job it was to oversee the German recovery. Clay’s job “was more difficult than MacArthur’s,” writes Cherny. “In Japan, the occupiers inherited an imperial government that had capitulated in fear of firebombs and mushroom clouds. Germany’s government had been eviscerated—nothing of Hitler’s regime remained, and the Americans had made an early decision that those who had been Nazis had no place in the governing of postwar Germany. … Americans were to install a thriving democracy. And then they were to wrap up and go home.”

Clay took the mission to heart, but most of his soldiers were skeptical. To cap it off, some of the Americans, especially the intelligence officers, lived in high style while German civilians openly fought over their tossed cigarette butts, which could be traded for meals. Berlin’s situation was so desperate that it was estimated by social scientists that one in every four women past the age of puberty was trading sex for food (as many as 130,000 had been raped repeatedly by the Soviets before the Americans arrived; of those, thousands committed suicide rather than live with the memory and the shame). Many would introduce the soldiers to their parents before they took them to a bedroom and serviced them. With the monetary system in chaos, the soldiers paid them in chocolate and cigarettes. Crime soared. The police force was pathetic, but they made 2,000 arrests each month in Berlin—as compared with 3,000 for the entire year of 1935, before the war.

In 1945, due to starvation and exposure, only one in 10 German babies survived. And as bad as that was, it got worse.

Massive bombings by the Americans had destroyed the infrastructure. There was little shelter left intact, and there was also little fuel. The winter of 1947 was the coldest in a century. Twelve thousand Berliners died in the freezing temperatures. Many thousands more died of starvation, malnutrition or disease. Displaced Germans who weren’t too shell-shocked or sick to leave swarmed into the rest of Europe. They hated and distrusted the Americans who had rained bombs on their country, and who boasted of how badly Germany would be punished for its nightmarish array of crimes against humanity.

The U.S. military hired sociologists to conduct surveys to see if the remaining Germans were being effectively won away from their Nazi ideology. They weren’t. “Six months after the war had ended, a bare majority of Germans agreed with the statement that Nazism was ‘a good idea badly carried out.’ By the summer of 1947”—two years into the American occupation—“the number who believed this had risen,” writes Cherny. American GIs constantly saw “88” newly graffitied on walls. They eventually realized it was code for “HH”—“Heil Hitler.”

After enduring so much during our occupation, the Germans were then threatened by the Soviets, who saw America’s resolve evaporating. The kidnapping of Americans in Berlin was common, and the Americans here at home loudly protested how much money our occupation was costing. President Truman’s chief opponent, Henry Wallace, campaigned for “peace” and accused Truman of carrying out a “reign of terror here at home” and trying “to frighten the people into silence.”

In the hoopla of 1948’s election season, no one in Washington was giving direction to the officers in Germany. So as the Soviets, who vastly outnumbered the Americans, cut off supply routes to Berlin, American Col. Frank Howley took it upon himself to go on the radio and tell the Berliners, “We are going to stay. I don’t know the answer to the present problem—not yet—but this much I do know: The American people will not stand by and allow the German people to starve.”

As everyone knows, American soldiers managed to turn the situation in Berlin around and triumph. The peace-loving democracy of today’s Germany is a product of the West Berlin that we occupied. I cannot tell you how the story ends, because it hasn’t ended. The post-Reich Germans, who courageously put their trust in us when it would have been easier to invite the Soviets in, are still our allies. We built a lasting peace.

Today, many Americans are dismissive of the Iraqis. Yet the Iraqis have already sacrificed far more for their democracy than the vast majority of their American civilian detractors have ever sacrificed for anything. I believe in the Iraqis, in America’s military and in the American people. I look forward to Iraq’s ability to fully stand on its own, but I still support the American occupation of Iraq. SP