Military Review English Edition May-June 2016 | Page 51

MILITARY OCCUPATION

a committed effort to rebuild the national infrastructure and establish democratic governance.
Common sense might have indicated that since
Iraq was a less-developed country with a less homogeneous population, and much less of a tradition of either
industrialization or democratic rule, to achieve our goal
of producing a democratic, capitalistic Iraq should have
been recognized as a commitment that would require a
long time—perhaps generations.
In summary, occupations require enlightened
leadership, extensive training and education, and
whole-of-government efforts, even in countries that
may share a heritage of industrial development and
democratic traditions where our desire is to return the
country to a peaceful and stable democracy. However,
the planning requirements should be seen as even more

important for less-developed countries without an indigenous democratic tradition or experience in modern
industrial organization and economic management.
Going into the occupation of Iraq, we ignored or misinterpreted our prior, extensive experience in the occupation of Japan (and postwar Germany), tacitly assuming
the Iraqi people, freed from Hussein’s criminal abuse,
would spontaneously produce a stable, friendly democracy led by a corps of altruistic and patriotic Iraqi
managers that we quickly discovered did not exist. For
any future occupation duties, we have to learn from the
past, pay attention to what area experts tell us, closely
tailor the occupation to the present situation, avoid
dogmatically using assumed templates from past experience, coordinate across the government, and keep our
eyes and policies focused on the art of the possible.

Biography

Col. David Hunter-Chester, U.S. Army, retired, has a PhD in East Asian studies. His military career included assignments in Germany, Iraq, and the Pentagon, and he spent fifteen years in Japan.

Notes
1. John W. Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010),
325.
2. Thomas C. Smith, Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1989); David L.
Howell, Capitalism from Within: Economy, Society and the State in
a Japanese Fishery (Oakland, CA: University of California Press,
1995).
3. Carol Gluck, “Japan’s Modernities, 1850-1990s,” Asia in
Western and World History: A Guide for Teaching, eds. Ainslie T.
Embree and Carol Gluck (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1997).
4. John W. Dower, Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and
the Japanese Experience, 1878-1954 (Cambridge, MA: Council on
East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1979).
5. John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of
World War II (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1999).
For the perspective of a Japanese-speaking Westerner who lived
through the war years in Japan, see Isaac Shapiro, Edokko: Growing
up a Foreigner in Wartime Japan (New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2010).
6. My observations of the Iraq occupation are almost entirely
personal, from my time serving in the Coalition Provisional Authority’s Office of Policy, Planning and Analysis (CPA, OPPA), December 2003 through May 2004. Carol Gluck described histories of
the American occupation of Japan written by former officials of

MILITARY REVIEW  May-June 2016

that occupation as “history written close to the bone,” noting a lack
of detachment, and I am aware the same can be said of my personal observations of the occupation of Iraq. For Gluck’s comment,
see Carol Gluck, “Entangling Illusions—Japanese and American
Views of the Occupation,” New Frontiers in American-East Asian
Relations: Essays Presented to Dorothy Borg, ed. Warren I. Cohen
(New York: Columbia Press, 1983), 174.
7. Michael A. Barnhart, Japan Prepares for Total War: The
Search for Economic Security, 1919-1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).
8. Dale M. Hellegers, We, the Japanese People: World War
II and the Origins of the Japanese Constitution (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2001); Marlene J. Mayo, “Wartime
Planning for Japan,” Americans as Proconsuls: United States Military
Government in Germany and Japan, 1944-1952, ed. Robert Wolfe
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984).
9. Earl F. Ziemke, The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany
1944-1946 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1990).
10. For the most complete description of planning efforts for
Iraq, see Gordon W. Rudd, Reconstructing Iraq: Regime Change,
Jay Garner, and the ORHA Story (Lawrence, KS: University of
Kansas Press, 2011).
11. Ziemke, U.S. Army Occupation, 20–23.

49