You have to be patient," says Paul Bremer, the de facto American Governor of Iraq, sitting in his small office in the cavernous Republican Palace in Baghdad. "None of us has any experience in this," he says, referring to the reconstruction task ahead of him. "Those who do are over 90. We have not done it since Germany."
The analogy is both apt and troubling. Like Germany at the end of World War II, Iraq is an urbanized but ravaged society living in the shadow of a vile dictatorship. As in Germany, the systems for providing essential services like water and power have been wrecked. As in Germany, basic conditions of order and security are lacking in much of Iraq; there are too many weapons in the hands of too many people prepared to use them to settle old scores or redress new grievances. For American troops, Iraq is still a dangerous place. In the three weeks of war before U.S. soldiers penetrated Baghdad and hauled down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, 123 Americans died at the hands of the enemy or in accidents. In the weeks since April 9, an additional 55 have been killed, 15 of them by hostile fire. "The war has not ended, Madam," said Lieut. General David McKiernan last week, when asked at a press conference how many U.S. troops had been injured "since the end of the war." As if to confirm his observation, the Pentagon is delaying planned withdrawals of some of the 150,000 troops stationed in Iraq, including the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, some of whose soldiers have not been home for nine months. Under the original blueprint for a postwar Iraq, says a Pentagon official, the U.S. was supposed to have no more than 75,000 troops in the country by September. That's still three months away, but the official already says, "We're not so sure that's going to happen."
The state of postwar Iraq seems to have caught the Administration off guard, and its lack of preparedness has opened it to criticism in Congress. In time, American soldiers can come home. In time, electricity will be restored, potable water made to flow, guns taken off the streets and all the other hurdles to peace and prosperity overcome, as they were in Germany. Indeed, Bremer and his aides at the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs (ORHA) insist this is happening. Each week, they say, power is on a bit longer, more police cars are in the streets, more clean water is available. But time is the key. Two years after the end of World War II, Germany's cities and economy were still wrecked. It was another two years before West German politics had matured enough to establish a new constitution, six more before the Allied powers' legal authority over the German government ended. Which raises the question: Does the U.S. have the stomach for an occupation of Iraq that could require a commitment of as long as a decade? And if so, does it have the skills to handle such an undertaking without breeding the sort of resentment that perpetually places young Americans in uniform at deadly risk?