M.D. Nalapat
MANIPAL, India, Oct. 13 (UPI) -- After
World War I, the consequences of the Versailles "peace" were the rise
of the National Socialists and World War II. That conflict was followed by the
Marshall Plan, the democratization of Germany, Italy and Japan and their
bonding with the United States and the United Kingdom into both a security
alliance as well as an economic partnership. Both British values and American
culture permeated the three former Axis powers, vacuuming away the hostility in
the minds of their populations to the victors.
Today, some Germans (as indeed many
Britons and more than a few French) may be against what George Bush did to
Saddamite Iraq. Almost none are anti-American except in a narrow political
sense -- in other words, except in the same way as many Britons are
"anti"-Blair and several U.S. citizens "hostile" to Bush.
Why did the Peace imposed after World War
II create a benign backlash while that which followed World War I create the
Hitler-Tojo-Mussolini monster? The reason was that conquest was achieved in the
1914-1919 conflict only on the ground, over physical territory. In the second,
it won over the mind of the "enemy" population pool as well. It can
be argued that the extremely liberal treatment given to the Germans after they
had backed the most loathsome dictatorship in history, a policy of forgiveness
that took within its fold more than 95 percent of those who had been active in
the NSDAP, helped avoid a second Hitler.
It is now clear that the formal respect
paid to the Emperor of Japan and to the non-militaristic aspects of the culture
of that civilization, together with an efficient MacArthurite democratization
and integration into the modern economy of Japan, transformed a power that had
been first suspicious of and then hostile to the West (at least for the
previous two centuries) into a reliable ally, despite the horrors of Nagasaki
and Hiroshima
Operation Enduring Freedom ought to have
been conducted by giving the same billing to a "Free Iraq" leadership
as was given to its U.S.-U..K participants. A Free Iraqi general conducting
press briefings jointly with the non-telegenic Tommy Franks, four stars
glistening on his lapel, would have had an effect similar to that created by
projecting Charles De
Gaulle as the heroic leader of a multitude of "Free
French," when the reality in German-occupied France was that the level of
resistance was far lower than that found in the eastern theatres, while active
collaboration was high. The "Free French" were, however, wonderful in
cinema newsreels and on the BBC and VOA, which was enough to preserve French
pride in the postwar period, avoiding the kind of backlash that made Paris the
prime mover behind the Versailles Treaty.
