WHEN TAMERLANE retook Baghdad in 1401, delivering mail and feeding babies weren't post-conflict priorities. Ticked that the Baghdadis had the cheek to revolt, the warlord put the city to the sword. There was no Fox or CNN to report the massacre. Tamerlane's signal--a message all too often sent by Mesopotamian tyrants past and present--was received nonetheless: Resist and you will die.
Pity General Tommy Franks or, for that matter, any American military commander tasked with overseeing a post-Saddam Baghdad. For in that amorphous, dicey phase the Pentagon calls "war termination," they will be radically departing from the Tamerlane template. U.S. and allied forces liberating Iraq will attempt--more or less simultaneously--to end combat operations, cork public passions, disarm Iraqi battalions, bury the dead, generate electricity, pump potable water, bring law out of embittering lawlessness, empty jails of political prisoners, pack jails with criminals, turn armed partisans into peaceful citizens, re-arm local cops who were once enemy infantry, shoot terrorists, thwart chiselers, carpetbaggers, and black marketeers, fix sewers, feed refugees, patch potholes, get trash trucks rolling, and accomplish all this under the lidless gaze of Peter Jennings and Al Jazeera.
Of course, how Saddam falls, by internal coup, assassination, or invasion, will deeply affect the initial shape of post-Saddam Iraq. But under any circumstances, Washington must have governing policies, implementing procedures, and Iraqi political personalities in line before the regime's dispatch.
That's why the Bush White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, and a cost-plus shadow government of Beltway consultants have been hashing and rehashing
options for governing a post-Saddam Iraq. Frankly, there is no perfect model for reinventing Iraq. Afghanistan is still an experiment, though the interplay of tribal and sectarian factions is instructive. The democratic reconstruction of Japan and Germany after World War II are the favorite analogies of most pundits. But the parallels are weak. Japan is a homogenous society, and MacArthur let the Japanese keep their emperor. With the emperor as puppet, the American Caesar pulled the strings. Iraq is fractious, a Baghdad satrapy with rebellious provinces, ruled by a despot who is more Al Capone than Hirohito. While Iraqi de-Baathification could be compared to German de-Nazification--they are both fascist doctrines that morally corrupted and destroyed generations--the postwar German occupation rapidly became a Cold War confrontation. And Iran is no USSR.
There is, however, an almost unmentioned model that some U.S. military planners are beginning to consider: the post-World War II Anglo-American Allied Military Government (AMG) in Trieste. The Trieste AMG's experience provides useful insights at what the military calls the operational and tactical levels.
Consider the strategic, cultural, and ethnic tectonics. Trieste, an odd Italian city that was once the Austro-Hungarian empire's main seaport (and a James Joyce hangout), lies on the fault line where the "Latin, Slav, and German worlds collide" (Dennison Rusinow's phrase in "What Ever Happened to the Trieste Question?"). In Mesopotamia the Iranian, Kurd, Arab, and Turk worlds collide.
In early May 1945, as allied troops assumed control of Trieste, they had to confront armed factions that short days before had been nominal allies. These armed factions had contradictory goals. Yugoslav (Slovene predominantly, with some Croat and Croat Serb) partisans occupied parts of Trieste. An Italian democratic resistance force, the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale (CLN) also emerged. The Yugoslavs quickly began forming their own (Communist) military administration. On May 5, the Yugoslavs fired on a pro-Italian demonstration, killing at least five people.
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