Shades of Weimar - The

Shades of Weimar - The big challenge occurred to me last night.

CNN was broadcasting, live, pictures of an endless line of Iraqis - former soldiers who've shucked their uniforms and were dressed in a motley assortment of civilian garb - walking south. They were apparently largely Shi'ites from the south of Iraq - according to John Keegan, the Shi'ite majority was largely shunted into the cannon-fodder regular army units, and the Republican Guard were largely minority Sunnis like Hussein. And they were going to walk home. They were tired, hungry, and had had enough.

And I was reminded of the Weimar Republic - the post WWI German government formed after Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated his throne after the Armistice.

The stories aren't entirely parallel. Germany wasn't conquered; many of its prewar institutions - the civil service, the state-sponsored Lutheran and Catholic churches - survived intact.

But there were parallels as well: vicious factions; an international "governing" body whose principals couldn't agree on how to deal with the situation; and those endless lines of soldiers walking home from the front. Oh, yeah - and the French, acting in self-interest borne of vengeance back then (understandably so) and perfidy today.

Early in the war, I posted a theory of which I'd picked up scraps; the US was going to try to use the less Saddameriffic elements of the Iraqi army as the nucleus of a new Iraqi administration. We all blew that one - the regular Iraqi military put up even less of a fight than expected, and has effectively dissolved (except in scattered instances when they were driven into battle at gunpoint by the Guards and Fedayeen - and that didn't last long). Their cohesion and morale were even worse than we'd expected. For purposes of providing help with reconstruction, the Army as an institution seems to be completely useless.

And this provides us a challenge; doing something to keep all these unemployed men busy. Idle hands are the Devil's work, but they're also the radical's tools. It's the idle hands of the returning German soldier that that joined the gangs - really private armies - of the extreme left and extreme right political parties. The Communists, Socialists, Monarchists and (eventually) Nazis went on to fight pitched battles, literally, in the streets of Germany, accelerating the misery and discontent started by the implosion of the German economy (whose collapse long predated the Great Depression, from which it also suffered greatly).

Iraq has 26 million relatively literate, relatively educated people; their infrastructure is intact to a degree the Germans and Japanese of 1945 could only dream of hungrily; they have a national and cultural identity that the typical Afghan does not.

They just need something to do.

Which is one excellent reason to keep the French completely out. They are a nation that celebrates indolence, indeed institutionalizes it; Iraq needs hard work.

Starting from the clean slate is somthing the West generally does well at: we bombed in Germany in the twenties (largely due to the League of Nations' inability to curb France's thirst for economic vengeance and help introduce actual rule of law in Germany); we succeeded beyond history's wildest dreams in Germany and Japan after WWII; Eastern Europe is developing, after years of teething pains - the more market-oriented the society, the better they're doing.

Here's hoping we learn from the best of those lessons.