Okay, George Bush has set us on the path of war, and in the days ahead Iraqi people, Iraqi conscripts, the fighting members of the all-volunteer US and British armies and numerous other human groups near and far from the battlefield have, as a consequence, been put squarely in harm's way.

I, of all people, don't want to elide that fact.

However, soberly speaking, there is every prospect from what we know that the US military will "prevail" militarily. So it is really important to start looking at what comes next.

The originally European-origin "laws of war" that have now spread around the globe and have become the global norm, as manifested in the Geneva Conventions, Hague Conventions, Vienna Conventions, etc etc are based on the concept of national soveriegnty. (Duh!) But what this means is that an army that finds itself--for whatever antecedent reason-- in physical control of national territory that is not "its own" is described under international law as being an occupation army in the foreign area that it occupies. And this, despite any amount of rhetoric about it being a "liberation army" or whatever.

The idea, in international law, is that the status of being an occupation army, and of running a military occupation, is only a transitional status . It lasts only until the occupation forces can be withdrawn from the zone occupied, or have their status there changed to that of lawfully present "guests". This latter status can be conferred only by the duly constituted or reconstituted national authority that legitimately exercizes sovereignty over the territory in question.

So there have been lots of military occupations in the history of the post-Westphalian state system, and we can look back and judge which of them have resulted in consequences helpful to the general global good, and which have not.

In general, I'd say the post-WW2 occupations of Germany and Japan stand out as among the most successful. In both countries, the central thrust of the policy of a Washington that at that point dominated the politics of the entire world was to rebuild these two countries on a democratic, tolerant, forward-looking basis, and to work actively to integrate them economically into broader regional and global economic arrangements.

It was that broader rehabilitative project that provided the political context within which the adoption of such policies as the post-war war-crimes trials, efforts at de-Nazification (in Germany) and rapid social and economic liberalization (in Japan), etc, was decided.

In my work on the Nuremburg Court, I not too long ago conducted a phone interview with Bradley F. Smith, the premier historian of the policy/political dimension of the Court. He reminded me that the men who made those decisions in the FDR and Truman administrations were by a large sober visionaries who had now lived through two world-shattering global confrontations during their adult working lives. In addition, post-August 1945, they knew that the genie of nuclear weapons was now out of the bottle. They were therefore determined to try to get the "get it right" this time, regarding Washington's post-war approaches on how to deal with the vanquished foes.

In particular, they wanted to avoid the mistakes of the post-WW1 Treaty of Versailles . But how those mistakes were characterized was, for a while, an issue of controversy in the FDR cabinet. His Treasury Secretary Hans Morgenthau, Jr, thought that Versailles had not punished the Germans enough. For a while, in the early fall of 1944, it looked as though his view-- which also advocated forcing Germany back into being a purely pastoral, i.e. de-industrialized, economy-- had prevailed. But soon thereafter the opposing view, articulated and advocated most forcefully by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, won out instead.

It is not entirely clear to me whether Stimson's advocacy of the basically rehabilitative rather than harshly punitive approach stemmed from his own strategic brilliance, humanistic "vision", etc. Or whether it was more a function of his job, being as how he had the direct responsibility both for continuing to fight the war to a successful conclusion, and then, for planning to run the occupation of Germany that, it became increasingly clear in those months, would shortly be ensuing. (Regarding war-fighting, Brad Smith has written perceptively about how, when word of FDR's adoption of the Morgenthau approach leaked out, the resistance of the German units in northern Europe immediately stiffened... )

Be that as it may, the rehabilitation of (West) Germany and Japan as democratic, basically tolerant nations well integrated into the global economy stands out as one of the crowning achievements of the post-WW2 US imperium. Those acts of rehabilitation were accomplished, basically, through the course of the multi-year military occupations that the US (and, in West germany, its junior "coalition Allies", Britain and France) ran in each of those countries. It can't be denied that a good boost to the rehabilitation project was provided by the onset of Cold War rivalry: both Japan and West Germany came rapidly, in the late 1940s, to be viewed as important bulwarks against Soviet expansion. But still, the rehabilitation project was started before the Cold War became an issue.

Those two occupations were ended through the conclusion of peace treaties between Washington (and other Allied powers) and the duly reconstituted national authorities of democratic Japan and West Germany. As part of those treaties, the US was allowed to retain forces in the two countries under "Status of Forces Agreements" (SOFAs), and each of the two countries entered into treaties of military cooperation and mutual defense with the US. But at that point, the US completely ceded to the reconstituted national authorities all the other normal rights of sovereignty. Job successfully done!

Thank you, Henry Stimson.

And then, there are the less succesful military occupations of recent history. The ones I know most about are the various military occupations that Israel ended up running, of the terrains of various Arab countries, after 1967; and the 18- (or 22-)year occupation it sustained in Lebanon until May 2000.

Actually, I guess you could say that Israel's post-1967 occupation of Egypt proved, in the long run, to be something of a "success" -- from Israel's point of view, as from that of general regional stability. In 1979, the two governments signed a peace agreement. Under its terms, Israel traded its 11-year control of the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt agreeing to end the state of war that had persisted between the two countries since 1948. Given that Egypt is easily the Arab world's largest and weightiest country, this peace treaty considerably lessened both the risk that another big Arab-Israeli war would break out, and-- if despite that, it might still do so-- the scale of the [potential negative consequences of such a conflict.

Israel's 36-year occupation of a substantial chunk of Syria's terrain, in the Golan, has been less of a "success" from this standpoint. Gosh, I wrote a whole book on this subject that came out in 2000, so I'll try to keep it brief.

Bottom line: Israel's unwillingness to withdraw from the entirety of the Syrian territory there, and Syria's persistent refusal to settle for anything less than that, mean that the occupation continues. So does the state of war between these two countries. And so does the prolonged human tragedy of (1) the 15,000 or so Syrian nationals who stayed in their homes on the Golan all these years, chafing under the laws of the military occupation, and (2) the half million or so Syrian nationals who are refugees (and the descendants of refugees) who had fled their homes on the Golan in the chaos and fearfulness of the fighting of 1967, and who have not been allowed to return to their homes and farms there ever since.

And moving right along here to some truly disastrous occupations, we can look at Israel's occupation of great chunks of Lebanon between 1982 and 2000, and its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza which has continued to fuel conflict and violence from 1967 to the present day.

I don't have time here to write much about the occupation of the WB&G, except to note that it still most certainly exists. This, despite attempts by many pro-Israeli parties to finesse the language and get people to talk, for example, about "the disputed territories" rather than "the occupied territories". (There was also, of course, the attempt last summer by Bombs-Away Don to describe them as "the so-called occupied territories.")

Several pro-Israel flacks have tried to argue that because the status of the territories in question prior to the war of 1967 was unclear, then maybe they are not really "occupied". That argument is a weak, weak reed. Back in 1947, the UN had ruled that all the terrain of the WB and Gaza-- except for that of Jerusalem-- should be the Palestinian Arab state that would be established in that area alongside the Palestinian Jewish state, Israel. (Jerusalem was supposed to come under international governance. It still could.) So if we care for the UN at all-- which I guess we can conclude Bombs-Away Don really doesn't, all that much-- then the legitimate "ownership" of the WB &Gaza is quite clear.

And even if it is not clear, what could be the nature of Israel's claim to those lands? It could only really be either (1) Biblical, or (2) the power of military might makes right. On the Bible, my own idea of G-d is not that he's a real-estate agent-- and why should anyone believe that non-Jewish people should have to bow the extremist religious-Zionist view of what G-d wants in thei regards? Hey, maybe Allah gave it to the Muslims! This would be quite an unreal argument all round... Let's just leave it to the UN, okay? As for "might makes right", well, you probably know what I think of that argument. (Which happened to be Bombs-Away Don's.)

So yes, a military occupation is most certainly in place there in the WB & Gaza, and has been for 36 years now. Even including that somewhat tiny blip on the historical screen when the Israelis handed over many "local" powers to the Palestinian Authority in the years after 1993-- the very same local powers that the Israeli military is now systematically stripping away from the Palestinians as the world looks on.

The occupation of the WB&G has not been a success from anyone's point of view. Except perhaps that of supporters of the broad project to settle Jewish Israelis inside those occupied areas. Around 400,000 settlers have been implanted to date. That whole project is a grave breach of Article 49 of the 4th Geneva Convention , which states explicitly that, "The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." 

But the settlement project notably does not have the support of the whole of Jewish-Israeli society.  In poll after poll, roughly two-thirds of Jewish Israelis still say that in return for a decent peace agreement with the Palestinians, they would be prepared to withdraw from nearly all the occupied Palestinian territories and accept the dismantlement of nearly all the settlements.

Israel's continuing occupation of the WB&G has not brought peace or increased wellbeing to either the Palestinians or to israeli society as a whole.  Most certainly, it has not increased the general stability of the region.  I've been working with a Quaker Working Party on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and our report-- which deals with these issues at great length-- should be out sometime this summer.

And then-- you might not believe this, but this is where I was heading all along-- we come to the sad, sad history of Israel's 18-year occupation of great chunks of Lebanon from 1982 through 2000.

Many aspects of this history are, or should be, very salutary for Americans today. Let's just run through some basic facts:

-- This occupation was initiated when the Israeli government (under the influence of then-defense Minister Ariel Sharon) launched a massive blitzkrieg attack against Lebanon. Israel had overwhelming military superiority. The immediate "trigger" for it was the near-fatal shooting, by an anti-Arafat Palestinian faction, of Israel's Ambassador to London, Shlomo Argov. But in reality, "Operation Peace for Galilee", as the invasion was called in Israel, had been planned long, long before then. As Israelis rapidly came to conclude: this had been a war of choice, not of necessity, for them.

-- The invasion was sold to the Israeli public as helping restore their dented sense of security by extirpating the threat to Israel posed by Palestinian guerrillas who had bases in Lebanon not far from Israel's borders. But actually, it rapidly became cleasr to Israelis and everyone else that the fundamental war aim was "regime change" in Beirut, with the installation as President there under Israel's tutelage and superior firepower of the pro-Israeli militia boss and Falangist gunman-- I kid you not, openly Falangist!-- Bashir Gemayyel...

(Have you noticed any parallels yet to the Bushies' present policies on Iraq? And keep looking. There are more. The future-possibilities ones are really scary.)

Okay, so technologically and militarily everything went swimmingly at first for the Israelis. But, as I reported in my 1991 book The Superpowers and the Syrian-Israeli Conflict , the venerable Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld wrote in December 1982 that, "By 1982 the IDF was, relative to its size, as well armed as any force the world has ever seen... The IDF in Lebanon piled tank upon tank and gun upon gun. A command and control system superior to anything previously employed made it possible to achieve good interarm cooperation and, above all, to spew forth vast amounts of ammunition to destroy the country which the IDF had allegedly come to save. The results, nevertheless, were disappointing."

As they swept northward through south Lebanon, many Israeli tank crews were greeted by local villagers strewing their path with rice and rose-petals in a traditional gesture of welcome. The Lebanese had many of their own gripes with the Palestinian guerrillas, and most Lebanese were only too glad to see the back of the guerrillas when they sailed out of Beirut harbor, according to a US-brokered ceasefire plan, in early August. Soon thereafter, the Lebanese Parliament, meeting in a chamber ringed by Israeli tanks, elected Bashir Gemayyel President. It looked as though Sahron's plan had scored all its hoped-for victories...

But almost immediately, things started to go wrong. Bashir was assassinated. His fighters went on a murderous rampage in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila (under the watchful and supportive eye of their "handlers" from the Israeli security organs, as an official Israeli inquiry was later to establish).

Then, it turned out that though the South Lebanese were glad to see the back of the Palestinian guerrillas, for some amazing reason they did not also feel that they'd signed on for a lengthy period of Israeli occupation. Israel tried to use its local Lebanese allies to impose its control on the southerners. But the southerners-- most of whom are Shi-ite Muslims-- were not about to accept being ruled by Israel's allies who were coming, mainly, from the Maronite Christian communities further to the north. And so, many of those very same villages that had welcomed the Israeli tanks with rice and flowers in the summer of 1982 soon started to incubate a completely new force of fighters committed to resisting the occupation. It was called Hizbollah.

Today, Hizbollah is a large, widely respected (by most Lebanese) part of the Lebanese body politic, and has eight or so members in the Lebanese Parliament. Before the Israeli invasion of 1982 it didn't even exist.

So anyway, absent their local puppet-ruler Bashir Gemayyel, and with Bashir's hastily-named successor (and brother) Amin Gemayyel starting rapidly to slip out of their hands, the Israelis found it increasingly hard to figure out how the heck to get themselves out of Lebanon. I kid you not. They were caught in the classic "security dilemma", whereby almost every action they took to meet what they thought of as their immediate security needs ended up harming their longer-term security interests. Especially, as they got into an increasingly destructive cycle of violence and counter-violence with the indigenous population of South Lebanon, they found that they had created so much hatred and resentment there through the violence of their ghastly series of "counter-measures" that they felt they could not just "turn tail and leave" the area for fear the Southerners would come right after them in "hot pursuit".

And then, there was of course also their adherence to what I call the sad old canard of credibility . Boy, the Israelis really got trapped in that in Lebanon, big-time.

And meanwhile, the costs that maintaining the occupation imposed on Israel continued to rise. (The costs imposed on the south Lebanese were, of course, far far higher in both blood and treasure. But I'm looking at the Israeli side of things here.) In the fighting of summer 1982, around 600 Israeli soldiers had lost their lives. That was a lot for what most Israelis soon came to realize had all along been a "war of choice", not a "war of necessity". But maintaining the occupation also came to cost increasing numbers of Israeli lives. By the time Israel finally pulled out, in 2000, more than an additional 600 members of that state-of-the-art military force had also perished there.

And then, there was the economic cost. Maintaining an occupation is a labor-intensive and costly business, it turns out. By 1984, Israel's rate of inflation had soared to an annual rate of 373 percent, with the main reason for that being generally given as the cost of the occupation of Lebanon.

Between 1984 and 1985, the inflation rate was brought back under control, by using two main strategies. Firstly, with the help of Reagan-era Secretary of State George Shultz, major structural adjustment was imposed on the Israeli economy as the cost of getting an emergency injectiuon of new US economic aid. That decision prompted a precipitous shredding of many of Israel's valuable social programs.

Secondly, the Israelis agreed to pull their troops back from nearly all of the area of South Lebanon they were controlling. Effectively, they ended up handing the areas they evacuated over to Hizbollah and the Syrians. In fact, by about Septemebr 1985, Israel ended up at just about the same line inside Lebanon from which it had launched the 1982 operation. Except that now, just north of that line, it faced a lot of new and very determined indigenous Lebanese enemies who had not been their enemies before and had a new determination to liberate the rest of their country, that is, the strip known in Israel as the "security zone"-- and in Lebanon as the "insecurity zone"-- which was a strip of land inside Lebanon that the Israelis had been occupying since 1978.

It took Israel a further 15 years-- and considerable additional casualties-- before it was able to extricate itself from that situation of continuing conflict and casualties.

And here's the thing. Look at the cost of the logistics involved, for Israel, in maintaining that occupation. What it meant, for Israel, was essentially driving those tanks and those APCs across their own border, and there they were.

But what the Bushies are now saddling American taxpayers with, is the cost of maintaining a massive military-occupation force in a country 4,000-plus miles away!!! Can you imagine how expensive that will be?

Oh, I'm sure the Bushies have said to themselves that they can start hitting up other countries to help pay some of or those costs. (About 80 percent of the cost of Desert Shield and Desert Storm back in 1990-91, after all, was met by contributions from Saudi Arabia, Japan, etc.) But this time, guess what? We don't really have any coalition like what we had back then. And almost certainly, given the rushed, half-assed and generally nature of the pre-war diplomacy, no formal prior agreements from any of those powers-- I'll wager-- that they would "buy in", ex post facto, to covering the cost of maintaining the US occupation of Iraq to any substantial degree.

Yes, possibly, just possibly, other international actors and donors can be persuaded to help cover some of the costs of doing the humanitarian work that will be desperately needed inside Iraq when the dust settles. (Though I don't imagine this will be anything like as easy to negotiate as the Bushies currently seem to assume.)

But the cost of occupation? The cost of dealing with the political-military consequences of a war that nobody else signed off on, except the Brits, the Ozzies, and Spain? I don't think that "we" Americans can expect to get very much help from anyplace else to help pay for that.

I say "we" here because it will be all Americans who end up paying the financial cost for this. The cost of maintaining the occupation, for however long it will last-- and who can tell us that at this point?-- will have to come out of our own national budget ; out of our desperately needed social, health, and other programs here in communities across the land. It is "we" who will all have to pay for this, even though many of us might have sought to dissociate ourselves from the policy of militarism and domination from the get-go.

One last point here. I note that the people of South Lebanon developed a very strong, very dedicated movement of resistance to Israel's occupation even though Israel never tried for a moment there (unlike elsewhere) to implant any of its national population as settlers in that zone of occupation . And even though Israel never seriously tried in any other way, either, to exploit, steal, or otherwise take advantage of the natural wealth of South Lebanon. (Unlike in Golan or the West Bank.)

I don't for one moment expect the US to seek to use its position as dominant power inside Iraq to start settling large cohorts of American civilians on a permanent basis inside that distant land... But it is entirely possible-- has already been widely rumored-- that this U.S. administration will seek to exploit Iraq's natural wealth for the benefit of American projects. Whether these are the private projects of well-connected U.S. corporations like the big oil companies, or the US government project of maintaining an expensive military occupation over Iraq may not, from the point of view of the average Iraqi, make much difference. What Iraqis can certainly be expected to resent seeing is the occupiers seeking to control Iraq's oil wealth in any way, shape, or form.

So we shouldn't expect that the U.S. can cover the costs of running the occupation from the revenues of Iraq's oil industry without any such attempt as this risking increasing Iraqi ire and resentment considerably .

It is, after all, their oil. And a nationalistic attachment to it as an Iraqi national resource has been a strong thread running through all the country's past history...

Which leaves us as Americans where?

Paying the cost of this occupation ourselves. And we can ask the Israelis how high those costs might be.