The German media enthusiastically draws parallels between the American abuses at Abu Ghraib and the Nazi concentration camps. The Bushitler thing is so old it's hardly shocking anymore. But now "modern America = Nazi Germany." Even the conservative, mainstream "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" writes about "a pile of naked men that reminds us of pictures from the concentration camps."
Overlook the fact that the concentration camp photos showed piles of dead bodies. Apparently that difference doesn't register in the German media. Overlook, too, the fact that the German media had zero interest in Abu Ghraib under the prison's previous owners. Pictures exist from that phase in the prison's history. The only reaction I have to those of them I've seen is a line from Günter Grass: "I couldn't eat enough to puke enough."
But overlook it, because I will say, in Abu Ghraib, Americans got a glimpse over the precipice that leads to a Death Camp.
I haven't read many books more cold-blooded than Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men (1992). He tells of a group of average German civilians who mustered into the military as Reserve Police Battalion 101, shipped off to the Eastern Front, and methodically rode from village to village across the plains of Poland, marching the Jewish men, women and children of each place out to the woods and shooting them individually to death.
This book paints the horror with an everydayness that makes it the more horrible.
On their first assignment to kill Jews, in the Polish village of Josefow, the battalion's major gave his troops the option of "excusing themselves" from the task. Of the 500 in the unit, only about a dozen did so. They were not punished. The rest slaughtered 1,500 women, children and old people. They became one of Nazi Germany's most efficient extermination units; by the time Police Battalion 101 disbanded in late 1943 "the ultimate body count was at least 83,000 Jews."
[If this sounds familiar, but you haven't read Browning, realize that his research was a key source for Daniel Goldhagen's bestseller Hitler's Willing Executioners.]
Browning's new book, The Origins of the Final Solution, explores how the Holocaust came to happen. It was not Hitler's plan all along; it evolved. The racial policy shifted as the military campaigns in the East rolled up huge successes. There was no direct order from the Führer to exerminate. "But local commanders, whether SS officers or administrators in occupied territory, always sensed that more extreme action on the ground would find approval above them," a reviewer of the book observes. Hitler is portrayed as a leader who "filled the air with fearsome innuendo, but left it to junior figures to put into practice what they sensed he wanted -- and what they wanted too." In the end, "[t]he Wannsee Conference of January 1942 only made the German bureaucracy complicit in what was already being done."
Among Browning's revelations in the new book, one seems to have caught the eye of British reviewers, in publications that take a dim view (at best) of the war to overthrow Saddam. "The decisive impulse (to the Final Solution) was not defeat but the euphoria of victory in Russia, in the summer of 1941," a reviewer writes. "It was the sense that they were invincible which persuaded the Nazis that the genocide of Soviet Jews, which they were already carrying out, could be extended to the Jews of every nation they controlled."
Euphoria of rapid victory ... war crimes that begin with low-level decisions, implicitly sanctioned from above ... something seen at first even by Himmler as "un-German" becoming a fact, then a policy ... the mix of semi-professional soldiers with loutish tendencies and leaders willing to turn a blind eye to brutality.
Yes, it's there. The parallel is there. If you only look at it through a drinking straw.
Now put the straw down and look at the whole scene. What came before? In Germany, whole generations of demonization of Jews -- they were vermin, disease, the focus of a century of legal restrictions and social exclusion. This was approved in the churches, in the universities, and in the political parties of all stripes.
In the U.S., we have a welcoming culture that is aware of its own mongrel, immigrant origin. Some cartoonish Arab bad guys in a few Hollywood movies hardly are the equivalent of Der Stürmer's vicious blood-libels. Imams visit the White House. Courts uphold muezzin chants. After 9-11, in town after town, neighbors protected Muslim women who were afraid to walk in the street in their distinctive garb. The list goes on.
What came after? Were the American abusers sent off to the next prison, to continue their work? Were their bosses promoted and their leaders pleased? The criminals have been sacked and await punishments. The whole system has been shaken by the revelation. Civil and military tribunals convened, the chain of command exposed and scrutinized. Even though the recently released memos show Bush rejecting any interrogation methods that don't meet Geneva standards, the outcome of all this very likely will be the defeat of his entire administration.
The German fighting force of 1940 was the finest professional army in the world. And before it was over, even the proudest outfits had been tainted by war crimes. Americans are not better than Germans. American National Guard prison units from Pennsylvania are not inherently morally superior to German police battalions from Hamburg. What is the difference? Start with transparent institutions, free inquiry, a cultural sense of right and wrong that had not gone completely mad over a demonized enemy, and, yes, a media that is willing to expose crimes.
The German press probably should not push this line too hard. It could lead to some embarrassing comparisons.
Pundits on both sides invoke Abraham Lincoln in the modern debate over Bush's war against Saddam, the disposition of terror suspects, and the Patriot Act.
I'm not interested here in comparing the Constitutional complications of the 1860s and those of today. The nature of the U.S. government and its powers have changed enormously since Lincoln's day -- largely as a result of the Civil War itself, and the Reconstruction amendments. Anything more than a superficial comparison only is possible amid a jungle of explanatory paragraphs swarming with footnotes.
The situations, too, are different. Lincoln faced the economic and physical disruption of the union, with a third of its population and a great deal of its revenue-generating section trying to depart. He faced the sudden emergence of a new world power on the doorstep of the remaining section, with potential powerful allies like Britain and France eager to see the fall of the United States.
After Sept. 11, Bush faced relatively fewer, more distant, and scattered enemies. But they were ideologically focused, not on escaping from the U.S., but on going right to the heart of it and unleashing fatal poison. And they are capable of a hellish destructive force never dreamed in Lincoln's day.
Many of the constitutional issues do run in parallel, however, and Lincoln's response to the crisis echoes Bush's. (Their careers have broad similarities, too: Both men had checkered pasts and won disputed elections without a majority; both were blamed for starting a war unjustly when negotiated settlement was possible and for exploiting a national crisis to advance their private agendas and attain partisan goals).
Lincoln offers a model, good or bad, for the role of a president in times when the nation sails into murky waters and faces conditions not imagined when the laws were written.
Like Bush in 2001, Lincoln in 1861 faced a legal fog in defining his enemy, and delineating his war. Even among many people in the North, the power of a state to secede from the union was held to be a legal right. The Constitution, as read by many, was seen as silent, or ambiguous, on the issue. A range of positions could be defended. Buchanan's attorney general, for instance, had investigated the laws and concluded that, while the secession was not legal, the government had no authority to stop it.
Meanwhile, the seceded states formed themselves into a new nation. Lincoln's official position was that the Confederacy did not exist and that he was suppressing an internal rebellion. Yet in practice, he treated the South as a sovereign power. He blockaded its coast. His administration acknowledged its sea-rovers as privateers and not as pirates. When rebels invaded the North and were captured at Gettysburg they were treated as POWs, not as traitors to be hanged for treason, because they were commanded by officers holding commissions from the Confederate government.
In fact, Lincoln made every attempt to have it both ways, because his powers, as president, were limited differently in each case. Whichever situation gave him what he needed, that is how he painted the war/rebellion in that case.
He did so to recruit and maintain a large standing army to fight a modern war, and in doing so he broke the Constitution he had sworn to uphold, which was structured to provide temporary, minute-man armies (in a system little changed since King Alfred's aldormen led the Anglo-Saxon fyrd to repel Viking marauders).
He did so in sweeping aside civil rights, including habeas corpus, and filling Northern jails with men never charged with any crime. He did so in full knowledge that his nation was full of dissent, and his agents couldn't, or didn't care to, distinguish honest loyal opposition from active treason.
Lincoln had at his back a Congress driven by his allies. And he managed to skillfully avoid the courts. When he couldn't avoid them, he defied them. In the Merryman case in 1861, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney denounced the notion of arbitrary military arrest and defended civil liberties, and pointed out that only Congress had the right to suspend habeas corpus. And he admitted he could do nothing to enforce his ruling in the face of a military force "too strong for me to overcome." Taney wrote as defiantly as any anti-Bush zealot today. And the cause for his wrath was more immediate and dangerous than the Patriot Act:
“I can only say that if the authority under which the constitution has confided to the judicial department and judicial officers, may thus, upon any pretext or under any circumstances, be usurped by the military power, at its discretion, the people of the United States are no longer living under a government of laws but every citizen holds life, liberty and property at the will and pleasure of the army officer in whose military district he may happen to be found.”Lincoln wrote out a standing order for Taney's arrest, but it was never served. But Merryman set the tone and left it to the justices to decide whether to provoke fights, legitimate or not, that they had no power to win.
Lincoln got a break when an important case came to Justice James M. Wayne, who was perhaps the staunchest war supporter on the Court. In U.S. v. Colonel Gorman Wayne upheld Lincoln’s extra-legal (at best) recruiting drive in 1861 and its retroactive endorsement by Congress. “It is my opinion,” Wayne ruled, “that Congress has constitutional power to legalize and confirm executive acts, proclamations, and orders done for the public good, although they were not, when done, authorized by any existing laws.”
Even some who supported the Northern cause blanched at this notion, but it was in keeping with the general spirit of the administration and the pro-war press, which was to “preserve the union at all costs.”
Lincoln used his presidency to pack the Supreme Court with justices who would be more sympathetic to his purposes. Three of five justices who sustained the administration in the important Prize case of 1863 were new Lincoln appointments.
But the full question of whether the Constitution gave the president a special power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus during wartime never got to the Court. In large part that's because the administration made sure it didn't. It had a valid fear that the Court would rule against there being such a power under the Constitution, and such a ruling would undermine the war effort. On the other hand, by keeping the matter away from the Court, the administration could largely accomplish its policy.
Opposition, especially in the press, clamored for a test case to settle whether the arbitrary arrests were legal. Secretary of War Stanton thought it would be wise to do so, too, but Attorney General Bates talked him out of it. In a letter of Jan. 31, 1863, Bates wrote to Stanton that a Supreme Court decision against the habeas corpus policy “would inflict upon the Administration a serious injury,” and would do more good to the rebels “than the worst defeat our armies have yet sustained.”
Only after victory was secure, and only gradually and tentatively at first, did the Supreme Court begin to put the nation back on a Constitutional basis, which Lincoln and the Radicals in Congress had disrupted. Both Lincoln and Taney were dead by this time.
Lincoln had done what was necessary to his purpose, which he saw as saving America's future, and he let the lawmakers catch up as they would. Or he left it to the courts to undo the changes long after they ceased to be necessary. Some of them were never undone, and America after 1865 was never again ruled by the government that had been created in 1787.
History forgives him these transgressions (though they are more bitterly remembered in the South) because the war he led America into had a great (if unintended) result of freeing slaves. It gave them an imperfect freedom, to be sure. The backlash brought explosive violence into their lives. And real civil rights didn't come their way for another century.
Yet however imperfectly he did it, Lincoln defeated slavery -- an institution that had enjoyed the protection and support of the U.S. government until then. (Even so radical an anti-South man as Thad Stevens once took a case on behalf of a master reclaiming his runaway slave.) And history gives him that honor and Americans rank him among their greatest presidents.
The U.S. can invade Iraq, overthrow its dictator, and in time rebuild the country into a free, modern, open nation living under the rule of law.
To those of us who have asserted this, Germany in World War II is a recurring comparison. But is it the right one? Iraq today seems little like the Germany of 1945 -- a shattered nation that before its defeat had been tightly bonded by social organization and a strong nationalist tradition.
Instead, what I read and see from Iraq reminds me of the Germany of 1815: Regionally fragmented, partially liberated from its native petty tyrants, but with urnresolved issues of religion and politics. It has a civil service in its infancy, systems still corrupt, and a growing middle class restive for rights and reforms. It is a nation vulnerable to neighboring powers, with citizens increasingly maddened by the clash of their foreign liberators' egalitarian rhetoric and the humiliating realities of occupation.
Americans, as we work to put Iraq in its rightful place in the world and give the country to its people for the first time, would do well to look back, not to ourselves in 1945, but to the French of 200 years ago. There we can learn by example many mistakes to avoid, and at the same time we can take pleasure in learning them from our dear friends the French ruling class.
France in the Napoleonic era was not in the same superpower class as America today. It had achieved a sudden dominant position in the European power game, but still it could not fight all its enemies at once, or even certain combinations of them. And, in the era when the God of victories marched with the biggest battalions, it needed to continually swell its armies with ranks of conscripts from conquered lands. Yet a brief description of the French experience in the Rhineland is bound to set off bells of recognition for a modern observer of the U.S. in Iraq.
The Grand Army poured into the German Rhineland in 1792, rolling up cities and individual states whose armies were no match for it. Prussia and Austria, the two regional powers that could have stopped the invasion, were preoccupied with carving up and digesting Poland, and made only half-hearted attempts to fight a two-front war. By 1797, the French conquest was complete.
Contemporary French accounts emphasize that they were welcomed as liberators by the Rhinelanders. The French made the Rhineland a laboratory for their experiment of exporting Enlightenment and French Revolutionary values. They rapidly transformed the political and social landscape. They suppressed the local nobility and abolished serfdom. They enacted universal male sufferage and installed elected governments. They secularized ecclesiastical principalities, reformed the legal system, spurred industrial development, and modernized the infrastructure.
"[T]he French rebuilt occupied Germany from its foundations, particularly the Rhineland," Steven Ozment writes in his excellent short history of Germany, A Mighty Fortress [2004, p.159]. "The Code Napoléon encouraged comparatively open societies with greater social equality and individual rights (peasants were emancipated throughout the Rhineland), free trade, and religious tolerance."
There was an element of pragmatism in the French project. Not all the old power-structures were overthrown; some were co-opted. Larger states, for instance, were consoled in their defeat by being permitted to absorb smaller neighbors.
The reforms even had a liberalizing effect on the Rhineland's neighbors -- France's rivals in central Europe -- especially Austria and Prussia. The leaders of those nations knew they could more readily mobilize their populations to resist the French if the freedom France offered were not so tempting, and if the people felt a greater stake in their homelands.
But the positive effects of the French occupation were soon outweighed, in the minds of the occupied people, by its baleful aspects. And these were beyond anything the U.S. has done in Iraq or is likely ever to do there.
Unlike Iraq, the Rhineland found itself annexed outright to the nation that had delivered it. In many places, the French plundered outright, and overall they conscripted tens of thousands of Germans into the French army. International trade was restricted to focus on France's markets. A powerful current in the Rhineland's turn against the French, according to Ozment, was "the personal treatment Germans received at the hands of the French ...." He writes that "the French army was its own worst enemy," and tells of "frequent contact with quartered French soldiers and high officials, who stood over Germans as lords and masters, disdaining native culture and religions," which had a corrosive effect on the locals' attitudes.
The U.S. army has been nowhere near as bad as the French were (that's not a claim of national superiority; the crudeness of the times and the desperateness of the French situation together can account for it). But even the best-mannered occupiers will become an annoyance at last.
Ozment also notes that the practical Germans were "historically ill-disposed to reforms that pursued impossible ideals and utopian goals."
Conscripted Germans made up one-third of the army of 700,000 that Napoleon led into Russia in 1812. When the remnant straggled back, defeated, the German states rose up against the French, and, joined by Napoleon's other enemies, they together broke his power at the Battle of Nations at Leipzig in 1813.
"For all their appeal to Germans, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the Code Napoléon were not the cure-all for what ailed Germany. If Germans were to make a great leap forward, more French instruction was not what they required. What was needed most after 1813 was the freedom to make that leap out of their own history and on their own feet." [Ozment, p.161-2]