Occupation

I wonder how it is that Americans have forgotten what an occupation is like.

Every time we visit some historic site on the east coast, we discover something new about the occupation of America by the English during the Revolutionary War.

When we visited New Jersey, we learned that the colonists there were not especially excited about revolting. Then a squad of Red Coats came upon a farmer’s daughter and gang raped her. Word of that event spread like wild fire through the colony. Farmers out in their fields began carrying their muskets, ready and loaded, and then leaned them against a shock of corn stalks. As a squad of Red Coats marched by out on the road, a farmer could easily slip over behind a shock, take the rifle, pick off one of the occupying soldiers, put the gun back, and return to his field work as if nothing had happened.

When we visited Andrew Jackson’s childhood home along the Waxhaw River, the story there was that his neighbors didn’t want the Brits intruding upon their little township. When they tried to stop the Red Coats, they were slaughtered. The soldiers than went through the settlement and killed a number of the women and children there. North Carolina “remembered” the Waxhaw massacre and joined the Revolution. Jackson witnessed the slayings as a teenager. He spent time as a British prisoner. When the Red Coats came back in 1814 and tried to take New Orleans, Jackson commanded the forces of pirates, renegades, mountain men, and regular soldiers that crushed the proud troops of the British Empire and saved the Mississippi River from their control.

Along the Blue Ridge Parkway is a tourist center called the Virginia Explore Park. Among its living exhibits is one from the 18th century. The story told there by the docent was that Virginia, the largest and most productive of the British colonies at the beginning had little interest in the Revolution. Many of its men had served with the British against the French and Indians in the 1750s and 1760s. Unfortunately, about the time those men were to receive their major benefit for their years of service, land on which to settle, the King proclaimed that there would be no settling allowed in the very territory that had been set aside for those veterans.

Among those who earlier fought by the side of the Red Coats was George Washington.

As I think about these incidents in American history just from the Revolution, I wonder how anyone who has visited any major historical site related to the Revolution could be comfortable with sending our soldiers to occupy any foreign country. The dangers of the rogue action of just a few individuals changes hearts dramatically. The occurrences of “overkill” (we call it “collateral damage”) are not forgotten. The broken promises antagonize friends and make them enemies.

Wasn’t the situation that led to the Revolution one where England faced losing wood and other raw materials for its industries because of its autocratic and distant policy making? And when they sent troops to occupy the colonies, didn’t they aggravate the situation?

The purpose of sending our troops to Iraq was a little more complicated than that. Iraq dropped Scuds on Israel during the first Gulf War under President Bush 41. Then “Poppy” Bush was the target of an Iraqi attempted-assassination. Then not long after that war, Saddam Hussein violently suppressed Shi’ites America encouraged to rebel. And finally, control of Iraqi oil looked like it was slipping away. So we sent in the troops “to find weapons of mass destruction” and kept them there until the oil question was settled so our companies would gain the benefit.

The longer the Iraqis put off making that decision, the longer we have had to be there. All the timelines for projected drawdowns used to be tied to the oil decision. Now they are tied to the depletion of our military.

Occupations are chancy things. How many times over the decades since the end of WW II have there been riots and demonstrations in places like the Philippines and South Korea and Japan to close our bases and remove our military?

We should know from first hand experience that occupations are really not the best tool to resolve an international problem. Just because we are the ones doing it does not make it right. You’d think we know better.