Lessons for Iraq From Gettysburg

Historian James McPherson (frequently seen in Civil War historical shows) recently led a group of Pentagon officials through the battlefield at Gettysburg. The purpose was to prepare the officials for a conference entitled "Transition from Crisis" which dealt with the reconstruction of Iraq. There are some surprising parallels between post-war Iraq and the post-Civil War south, as documented by David Ignatius in the Washington Post (h/t RealClearPolitics).

To prepare for the discussion, McPherson guided the Army generals and Pentagon civilians along the rocky slope of Little Round Top to where the 20th Maine volunteers launched the mad bayonet charge that saved the Union army's flank, and then to the open field where Confederate Gen. George Pickett made his disastrous charge against the Union lines on Cemetery Ridge. After walking the battlefield, McPherson and the group explored what happened when the war ended -- and the intriguing parallels between postwar Iraq and the postwar South.

The Civil War, like the invasion of Iraq, was a war of transformation in which the victors hoped to reshape the political culture of the vanquished. But as McPherson tells the story, reconstruction posed severe and unexpected tests: The occupying Union army was harassed by an insurgency that fused die-hard remnants of the old plantation power structure with irregular guerrillas. The Union was as unprepared for this struggle as the Coalition Provisional Authority was in Baghdad in 2003. The army of occupation was too small, and its local allies were often corrupt and disorganized.

Reconstruction suffered partly because of a mismatch between a transformational strategy and haphazard tactics.

Many of the same internal struggles that we see today in Iraq were also present in different forms in the vanquished southern states.

The poison that destroyed reconstruction was racial hatred. The white elite managed to convince poor whites that newly freed blacks were their enemies, rather than potential allies. There's an obvious analogy to the Sunni-Shiite divide that has poisoned postwar Iraq. In the South, the die-hard whites began to believe that if they held tough, the North would abandon the campaign to create a new, multiracial South. And it turned out they were right.

By 1877, says McPherson, the North essentially gave up. Demoralized by the economic depression of 1873, Northern investors pulled back from projects in the South and turned their attention to the West. The troops occupying the South were withdrawn. White Southerners, defeated in war, had won the peace. The South slipped into more than 80 years of racism, isolation and economic backwardness.

What lessons does this dismal history convey for U.S. forces in Iraq? First, what you do immediately after the end of hostilities is crucial, and mistakes made then may be impossible to undo. Don't attempt a wholesale transformation of another society unless you have the troops and political will to impose it. Above all, don't let racial or religious hatred destroy democratic political institutions as in the post-bellum South. Giving up on reconstruction led to a social and economic disaster that lasted nearly a century. That's a history nobody should want to repeat, least of all the Iraqi insurgents.

They say that those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Let's hope we can learn the lessons from the past and keep the reconstruction of Iraq on solid footing.