« Never miss a chance to suck up to Dictatorship | Main | Zucker-vision »

The uncertain world of 1946 and the future we created.

Let’s mix up a batch of the following:

- A country that is weary with war, wanting to exact some form of retribution on the enemy, a hated despicable dictatorship that has been toppled with the use of US military force.

- Just before the enemy is beaten, a team of “Washington D.C. elite government leaders” puts together a plan for what is to be done with the beaten country and its populace.

- The Plan is presented to the President of the United States.

- Part of the plan involves partitioning the country into several large administration zones, and giving control to another party. A party that was once a close ally of the US but is now involved in the start of a clandestine war against the United States.

- Leadership of the UK and the US sign on to the plan, that is until someone gets a closer look at what the plan actually means in terms of lives that will be lost in the implementation of the plan.

Sounds like fun. What could go wrong? Smart people, concensus, the public loves it. Cool! Lets do it!

This isnt fake, it's a real plan with real people, but be careful. If you make a mistake and implment it rather than the less popular alternative, it could cost millions of lives in the world that would result.

Yeah, its a plan from a sort of "Study Group" alright,only it’s not the Secretary Baker and the Iraq Study Group of 2006; its Secretary of the US Treasury Henry Morgenthau and its 1946. The plan is called the “Morgethau Plan”. It’s the plan that came about before the Marshall Plan. It’s a plan for how to deal with Germany after the war. It’s a plan that is subtitled “Program to Prevent Germany from Starting a World War III" and most of the people alive at the time, and most certainly the Washington intelligencia would agree that the plan, draconian though it may seem to modern minds, would be just the thing to deal with the Nazis at the end of the war.

As Stephen Green would say “Read The Whole Thing Already”.

There’s more than one lesson for everyone to learn in this but here's a few that I offer in consideration:

1) Smart people can do very dumb things for very good, but very wrong reasons.

2) Public emotions can effect public policy in very bad ways. Giving the people what they want can and often does get alot of people killed.

3) Giving the public what it wants does not always supply the best solution.

4) Every generation has to make a choice as significant as this one. The ISG is simply this generations test. Fail to get it right can result in a plan as horrible and deadly as the Morgenthau plan being adapted, rather than the fantastically successful Marshall Plan.

It's time to stop the Iraq Study Group Plan before history damns us all for implementing it, just as it would certainly have done if we went ahead with the Morgenthau Plan.

Posted @ December 18, 2006 09:54 PM | Current Affairs