March 22, 2003 [LINK]

Historical analogies

History never repeats itself exactly, but there are always intriguing rough parallels. This war to liberate Iraq reminds one of the final campaign to conquer Nazi Germany from February to May, 1945. Even though it was obviously a lost cause, most German soldiers fought on to the bitter end because -- and this is important -- they were more afraid of Hitler and his Nazi henchmen than they were of the western Allies. Totalitarian systems enforce discipline by instilling fear in the population, and that is exactly what is happening in Iraq today. Loyalty to Saddam Hussein is based on pure unadulterated fear. However, this approach to governance imparts a "brittleness" to the structure of authority that is hard for people living in free societies to understand. Everyone obeys The Leader until a certain point when a "crack" in the government appears, and all of a sudden, defections start to multiply like wildfire. It is a classic "cascading" effect, which is one of the manifestations of chaos theory. This is what happened to Nazi Germany in March when the Americans and British breached the Rhine River, the last line of defense in the west. Imminent conquest robbed Hitler of his total authority, and for the last three weeks of the war, American and British forces advanced at a blitkrieg-like pace. (Germans on the eastern front faced an even more fearsome enemy in the Red Army; they stoutly defended German soil in the vain hope that the British and Americans would save the Fatherland from the Russian hordes.) Some people had feared that the Nazis would continue to hold out in a "National Redoubt" in the Alps, but it never happened; the fear-instilled Nazi myth of Aryan superiority was dead. The same thing happened when the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe suddenly collapsed in late 1989, as Communist ideology was exposed as a big lie. The astonishingly quick demise of the all-poweful Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was the most extreme case; hardly anyone in the West realized how much he was hated. Applied to the current situation, I think it's safe to say that at some point (perhaps very soon, if he is already dead), Saddam will no longer be able to instill fear in the Iraqi population and there will no longer be any reason for Iraqi soldiers to resist the Anglo-American liberation. Arab-Islamic fascism may linger on elsewhere, but its "homeland" in Iraq will soon be cleansed. Questions: Will the postwar U.S. military government carry out a "de-Baathification" program like the post-World War II de-Nazification program? Will Saddam's Baath Party henchmen flee to South America?