Now that Iraq is Saddamfrei, that shattered country is to benefit from a Bush Admin-istration reconstruction program that the New York Times called in mid-April "the most ambitious American effort to administer a country since the occupations of Japan and Germany at the end of World War II." This laudable objective became obscured in the first five weeks after the end of major fighting, when disagreements erupted in high places over the aims and timetables of U.S. policy in Iraq. The public watched a U.S. team stumble into the Mesopotamian huddle without a playbook.

Peacekeeping, like war, is an interactive process. The United States was clearly caught flat-footed by the level of anarchy that ensued in Baghdad and in the shatterbelt of Arab-Kurdish contact in the north. The mission was mis- or understaffed--a soupçon of civil affairs, military police lite, and administrators either clueless about what they should be doing, or unwilling or unable to function because of poor security. In the midst of mayhem, General Jay Garner, Washington's Douglas MacArthur designate, behaved like a patient off his medication. In a moment of delusional optimism, he averred that his tenure would last "three months or so", but that his legacy would be a democratizing, if not fully democratic, country under paroled Iraqi command. A little later, on April 23, he averred that, although the Iraqis may dislike us now, "in very short order, you'll see a change in attitudes and the will of the people themselves." Alas, Garner was yanked, denied the opportunity to savor the promised effusions of Iraqi gratitude.

The way things are shaping up, it appears that unless American administrators get a grip on the post-conflict disorder in Baghdad, Bush 41's Iraqi ulcer may become Bush 43's Middle Eastern hematoma. The smart money bet is that, for political reasons alone, the administration must get a handle on the situation. Anglo-American reconstruction of Iraq will therefore be neither brief nor cheap. For some commentators, this fact constitutes a post-September 11 affirmation of the alleged neo-conservative ideology of the Bush Administration. For others, it follows the logic of events: bad guys did unspeakable things to the United States on September 11, 2001, and other bad guys, linked to rogue states, could cause even worse mischief in the future. One therefore does not depose a terrorism-aiding regime only to allow a clone to rise in its wake. The surprising capacity of the Iraqi Shi'a to mobilize and organize, with and without aid from Iran, quickly vaporized hopes for an express, consequence-free exit of occupation forces.

So it was that the President's May 16 appointment of Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III as chief civilian administrator in Iraq seemed to bring some closure to the uncertainty. The notion of an Iraqi provisional government has been scrapped for now, with both the White House and Downing Street judging the political situation as being too fluid, and the potential Iraqi political players too disparate, disorganized, and unrepresentative to anchor a coherent political system. In the meantime, Americans and British, not Iraqis, are sovereign in Iraq. Not only is the Ba'ath Party history, but Bremer has required 30,000 party members who served in the public sector to seek alternative employment--and he has decreed the disbanding of the Iraqi armed forces.

This turn of events has buoyed those who feared a short-winded U.S. effort in Iraq. But nation-building in Iraq is war by other means. Recalcitrant supporters of the ancien régime have been put on notice that targeted looting, a sort of low-level guerrilla warfare with the purpose of making the country ungovernable, will not work. Washington has sent a message to Iran that its sycophants in Iraq will not be able to hijack a coalition military victory for its own purposes. Above all, the adjusted course speaks to America's determination, as in the past, to append democratic reconstruction to military victory.

The towering symbol of that past, of course, is the post-World War II occupations of Japan and Germany. Candidate George W. Bush, the ideological agnostic who repudiated nation-building and state-building as the false creed of New Deal liberals and un idealists, has lately become a born again reconstructionist. He has rediscovered the post-1945 American rehabilitation of Japan and Germany as models for what the United States must do in postwar Iraq. At the American Enterprise Institute's annual dinner on February 26, he said:

America has made and kept this kind of commitment before--in the
peace that followed a world war. After defeating enemies, we did not
leave behind occupying armies, we left constitutions and parliaments.

The dedication to such a result having been proclaimed from the highest office in the land and reconfirmed by a Presidential Envoy, other pieces of the Iraq puzzle will now presumably fall into place. The American occupation will soon normalize everyday life: get the ministries running, the schools to their sessions, the electricity working and the water running and clean, and so on. Meanwhile, Iraq's deposed leaders will have their days in a court of one kind or another, as Iraqi institutions are cleansed of the Ba'ath Party under the watchful eye of the U.S. military. As these efforts proceed, and as postwar Iraq settles down, the majority of Iraqis will grow receptive to occupation goals and even embrace a protracted U.S. troop presence.

Over the slightly longer haul, revived oil revenues will supposedly ease the economic burdens of rehabilitation. The once-flourishing Iraqi middle class will be resuscitated, along with its hypothetical democratic traditions and the vibrant civil society that allegedly characterized pre-Ba'athi Iraq. With any luck, too, fear of Tehran promoting Islamist parties among Iraq's significant Kurdish and Shi'a populations will encourage an insecure post-Saddam Iraqi government to nestle in the embrace of the United States.

There are those, as well, who see the success of the U.S. occupation of Iraq as having broader positive regional implications. William Safire predicts that under U.S. tutelage Iraq "will become the center of an arc of freedom from Turkey in the north to Israel in the south." Even Egypt, according to Safire, will "not long resist a tidal wave of liberty" that will sweep the Middle East.

But not everyone agrees. As to this last, regional point, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, speaking in Cairo on March 31, claimed that a U.S.-led war against Iraq would spawn "one hundred more bin Ladens." The war, and the ensuing U.S. occupation, would lead not to liberalization but instead to the damming up of any incipient waves of democracy in the region. It would "open the gates of hell", as former Egyptian foreign minister and now Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa said in Cairo on March 22. These two ought to know.

The other skeins of optimism may be questioned, as well. How will the United States nurture a democratic government that Iraqis see as legitimate? Since democracy is alien to the country, it may take a long time for the United States to build it; yet the closer the United States is associated with the effort, the fewer nationalist credentials will be enjoyed by those who emerge from under its wing. Moreover, the longer all this takes, the more likely the rise in resentment against what will seem to average Iraqis and other Arabs nearby as a colonial occupation. Already, Iraqis are complaining that they enjoyed more freedom under the British colonial regime than under Bremer. Continued chaos, assassinations and revenge killings, and the slow re-establishment of services make some Iraqis positively nostalgic for Saddam. Without access to a credible media, Arab rumor mills churn out black legends that the postponement of Iraqi self-government masks a Western confiscation of Iraq's oil. So while the temptation to declare victory and leave prematurely has clearly been avoided, other temptations, such as throwing good effort after bad if things do not go as planned, loom.

It may be that the U.S. occupation of Iraq will go precisely as the President seems to envision. One can hope so. But it will do no good to imagine the post-1945 U.S. occupations of Germany and Japan as sources of inspiration. The more one mines these experiences, the less appropriate to the moment and downright non-transferable they look. Indeed, it may be that the best purpose of studying those experiences is to learn what not to do, for the course of true democracy in Germany and Japan after 1945 did not run smoothly.

The Way We Were

In the silvery haze of our recollection of the "greatest generation",
the reconstruction and transformation of Germany and Japan from
totalitarian war-makers into peaceable democratic nations was an easy
road of intentions and hard work turned into benign consequences. The
truth is, however, that a full decade after World War II's finale,
many U.S. "nation-builders" considered their efforts a nearly
complete failure--and for good reason.

The fundamental problem was one of inflated, and subsequently dashed,
expectations. American occupiers assumed that, once the virus of
authoritarian rule had been purged, grateful Japanese and Germans
would enthusiastically embrace democracy. Instead, U.S. reformers
encountered torpor, resentment and resistance. General Lucius Clay,
who presided over Germany's U.S. zone of occupation, called
de-nazification his "biggest mistake"--a "hopelessly ambiguous
procedure" that created "a pathetic 'community of fate' between small
and big Nazis" and elicited the hostility of the population. John D.
Montgomery, a Military Government officer in postwar Germany,
confessed that the New Deal activism that fueled a missionary zeal to
convert erstwhile adversaries to democracy encountered a stone wall
of local enmity. "We had success in small ways", he wrote, "but in
1955, I was not at all sure either country was going to be a
democracy."

He was right to worry. Indeed, hardly had the U.S. occupation ended
when war criminals were set free, "undemocratic" bureaucratic
privileges and status were re-instituted, education reforms were
abandoned and quiet retribution was meted out to many who had
supported the occupation. Surveys taken a full decade after the war
discovered that a majority of Germans still believed that "Germany's
best time in recent history had been during the first years of the
Nazis." A significant minority opined that "Nazism was a good idea
badly carried out" and believed "Hitler was a great German leader."
Writing in 1961, an American historian of the occupation of Germany
recorded that "most of what Americans tried to promote as positive
programs produced negative effects that far outweighed their positive
results."

Of course, it is true that both Japan and Germany evolved over time
into flourishing democracies, pillars of harmony rather than enemies
of peace. In retrospect, this transformation appears nothing short of
miraculous. Both countries, after all, incubated aggressive military
cultures before 1945. And while Japan and Germany had experimented
with representative democracy, their feeble civil societies succumbed
rather easily to political violence and intimidation in the 1930s. So
how did success come about?

The truth is that the successful rehabilitation of the two former
Axis powers resulted less from Allied occupation policies than from
an array of other factors in combination. These included enlightened
political leadership, "economic miracles" spurred by the Marshall
Plan in Europe and the Korean War in Japan, and the precedent,
however frail, of functioning democratic government in both
countries. Japanese and Germans were both talented, innovative,
technologically-advanced peoples in 1945 who had been abused by their
political systems and pulverized by the war. They had both the skills
to rehabilitate their economies and the deep desire to put the past
behind them. Hardly had the blackout paper been pulled from windows
when, in the view of the historian John Dower, millions of Japanese
resolved "to create a private life free from the dictates of the
state." Above all, though, fear of the Soviets caused leaders in both
countries, supported by their populations, to take shelter under the
U.S. military umbrella.

In short, the real U.S. contribution was to take out the bad guys,
set the ground rules for democratic reform, provide basic
security--and otherwise get out of the limelight. The actual
rehabilitation sprang from a combination of what General Clay called
"the recuperative powers" of both the Japanese and Germans, "Soviet
frightfulness", and patience while Japanese and Germans overcame
their resentment of U.S. rule and internalized their democratization
in the 1950s and 1960s.

This is a far cry from what is now imagined to have happened. The
common, historically untutored assumption now is that if vicious and
amoral Axis populations, capable of ghastly cruelties and suicidal
fanaticism on an unprecedented scale, could be transmogrified under
direct and somewhat protracted American management into orderly,
law-abiding, even humdrum societies, then why not semi-Ba'athified
Iraq? After all, Saddam demoralized rather than fanaticized his
people, so in a fundamental sense Iraq should be easier to
democratize than was Japan or Germany. Doesn't Iraq merely have to
recover the strong traditions of civil society and cultural
pluralism, as Eric Davis has described them, submerged in 1968 by
chauvinistic pan-Arabism and the despotism of the Ba'ath Party?

Alas, it will not be so easy. Post-Saddam Iraq is a poor candidate to
replicate the success of Japan and Germany--a realization that seems
to have informed the initial reluctance of the Bush Administration to
undertake a nation-building role there. Though once a relatively
tolerant, pluralist society, Iraq has become a fractured,
impoverished country, its people susceptible to hysteria and
fanaticism. They are historically difficult to mobilize behind a
common national vision, and no Yoshida Shigeru or Konrad Adenauer can
be expected to emerge from a ruling class that inclines toward
demagogy and corruption.

Nor is the political environment of the Middle East likely to induce
Iraqi politicians, with the blessing of their population, to snuggle
up to the United States as did Japanese and German leaders during the
Cold War. Iran could be a problem but, unlike the Soviets, not a
large enough one to inspire such useful fear. Instead, most Iraqis,
taunted by Al-Jazeera images of Palestine and egged on by
opportunistic clerics of several sorts, are far more likely to see
America as their biggest problem. As for prewar experiences of Iraqi
democracy, there are none.

Dilemmas of Nation-Building

America's nation-builders in Iraq, then, have their work cut out for
them. While the historical precedent of governing postwar Japan and
Germany may supply inadequate blueprints for Iraq, nation-builders
will face many of the same problems encountered by Douglas MacArthur
and Lucius Clay after 1945, problems endemic to any nation-building
enterprise. We ought to study the German and Japanese models so that
we can avoid having to suffer through such nastiness all over again.

There are essentially four dilemmas that we will need to work
through. The first concerns the transition from the Anglo-American
occupation to a new Iraqi army and police force. The second is about
collaborators and retribution. The third concerns the tension between
the asymmetrical psychologies of defeat and liberation, and the
fourth has to do with balancing the need for both stability and
change.

Whose army?

Our first dilemma is to decide the size of the desired military
footprint and the duration of the Anglo-American military occupation
before turning the store over to the locals. Clearly, Iraq has
already paid a significant price in public order for the Pentagon's
decision for a "light" invasion that jettisoned weight for tactical
and operational speed. A significant military presence must remain
long enough to ensure essential services and law and order. The
docility of the Japanese and Germans, and the lack of an outside
threat until the Cold War began to harden, allowedfor a fairly rapid
drawdown of U.S. forces. After all, Truman planned for the American
occupation of Germany and Japan to last only two years.

While post-1945 occupiers planned to rule Japan and Germany
directly--even for these two years--in practice the repatriation of
U.S. forces swiftly turned over the task of running the country to
the locals, with the U.S. military retaining vague supervisory powers
over security, military government courts and de-nazification.
MacArthur's GHQ, which the Japanese joked stood for "Go Home
Quickly", offered a "super-government" to superintend the workings of
the Japanese bureaucracy, whose powers were actually enhanced under
American "indirect rule."

The fact of ongoing turmoil in Iraq, the need to police and
administer the country, and the threat of a national break-up or
civil war argue for a large U.S. garrison for the foreseeable future.
A significant troop presence will also give Washington leverage with
a new government as it is slowly forming. The costs of a heavy
occupation, however, will undoubtedly be repaid in a currency of
resentment, which will undercut the legitimacy of an emergent Iraqi
leadership reliant on U.S. arms for its security. A large troop
presence may actually de-stabilize other parts of the region as well,
creating more security problems than it solves--especially if U.S.
troops become targets for popular outrage and armed attacks.

In addition, soldiers are not particularly adept at
"nation-building", which they do not regard as their primary mission.
Those who have pointed out that U.S. troops have nevertheless done a
lot of policing and nation-building over the years merely state a
fact that has no real bearing on the essential point. If U.S.
soldiers do police and administrative work in Iraq for a long while,
Iraq will invariably come to look like a "second occupation", a
resurrection of the deeply resented British colonial presence. It
will also be associated in Middle Eastern minds with Israel's
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. A jostling of carpetbagger
American businessmen armed with lucrative contracts to rebuild Iraq,
backed by a massive military presence, will make Baghdad look like
Scarlet O'Hara's Atlanta. It will further stoke Arab skepticism of
U.S. motives, especially if Iraqis see their oil revenue diverted to
defray the costs of the occupation.

Whose democrats?

The second dilemma focuses on those Iraqis who would befriend and
collaborate with us. In Japan and Germany, the help of genuine
democrats prepared to look upon the American arrival as a true
liberation was seldom accepted by officials on the qui vive for
left-wingers or opportunists. Democrats soon came to resent the
cultural arrogance and authoritarian methods of the American Military
Government (AMG), as well as its preference for conservative
politicians hostile to democratic innovations, many of whom had been
close to the collapsed authoritarian regimes.

On the local level, the ability to speak English became the main
selection criteria for employment, which brought in a motley
collection of local AMG employees--some with criminal records--who
proceeded to install their friends in government jobs. Because local
U.S. Military Government personnel were inexperienced, frequently
rotated and almost never spoke the local language, they relied on
these people to inform de-nazification and "re-orientation" programs
and to decide on property requisitions to house Americans. As a
result, American occupiers who claimed to be democratizing Germany
instead appeared arbitrary and hypocritical to most Germans. "There
are your democratic friends from America", Germans who favored the
American programs were told. "What have they brought you?"

The same sort of thing is likely to happen in postwar Iraq. Of the
hundreds of officials in Ambassador Bremer's entourage, only about
twenty are active State Department employees with overseas
experience. The rest are political appointees sent by the White
House. This is no way to run a Raj, as the Russians discovered in
Afghanistan, where their presence between 1979 and 1988 was
underpinned by Soviet Communist Party officials seconded from local
duties to "state-building" activities abroad. Only three members of
Bremer's staff reportedly speak fluent Arabic. There are a fair
number of good English speakers among Iraqis, but that only makes the
task of discerning who is invested in unsavory motives even harder.
Not surprisingly, aspiring Iraqi politicians are cautious about
associating too intimately with neophyte foreign proconsuls who
depend on selected local collaborators for their knowledge of the
country. "It is very difficult to participate in something that we
have no control over", one insisted. "We don't want to be part of the
blame committee when something goes wrong."

In Japan, the American occupation was heavily laden with colonial and
racial overtones and unburdened by self-doubt. And while the United
States today is a much more multicultural, multiethnic and tolerant
society than it was in 1945, the Iraqis will nevertheless
characterize the American presence as a re-run of their imperial
experience. German and Japanese politicians discovered that
opposition to AMG policies, and claims that the Americans had allowed
socialists and communists to infiltrate the government to prepare the
revolution, were sure-fire formulas for election. Roughly analogous
political platforms could develop in Iraq, even though U.S.
administrators bend over backwards to be neutral in Iraqi political,
ethnic and religious disputes.

Defeat and liberation

A third, related dilemma is how to reconcile defeat and liberation.
By 1945, both Japan and Germany had been made to feel the hard hand
of conquest. Both countries were utterly devastated by Allied
bombing. The occupiers took the view that Axis populations were
incorrigibly vicious and immoral, indoctrinated to fanaticism by
decades of chauvinistic propaganda. "Unconditional surrender",
proposed by Franklin Roosevelt at the Casablanca Conference of
January 1943, expressed a determination to rebuild the Axis countries
from the ground up, so that they would no longer threaten world peace.

For Japan and Germany, utter defeat became the entry to liberation.
It was part and parcel of the logic of the war. Indeed, the two were
inseparable. As Dower has noted, defeat and surrender liberated the
survivors from the requirement to die. Defeat also discredited
militarists and Nazis and eradicated any residual desire in either
country to reclaim world power or even dominant regional roles. In
the ashes of their cities, Japanese and Germans were liberated from
the grip of ideology and became pragmatists, unlike 1918, when defeat
spawned violence and revolution. America's former enemies desired a
democratic, free-market future, not because the occupiers wanted it,
but because defeat caused a seismic attitude shift among the
populations who now wanted to put the past behind them and rebuild
their lives.

This is particularly clear in the Japanese case. MacArthur forced
conservative Japanese politicians to pass ground-breaking social
legislation--land and labor reform, decentralization of the police,
female suffrage, education and judicial reform, and a new
constitution--that they had every intention of revoking. But the
politicians were unable to do so because the Japanese people became
strongly attached to them. In Germany, Christian Democratic and
Social Democratic parties, sensing this mood shift, began before long
to encourage moderation and cooperation with the occupiers rather
than resistance to them.

Unlike postwar Japanese and Germans, Iraqis are unlikely to recognize
any such links between defeat and liberation. Their country has been
spared physical destruction on the scale that was inflicted on the
Axis powers. This should have made Iraqis well-disposed toward the
occupiers. Yet coalition forces opened to very mixed reviews in
Baghdad and surrounds. True, the weight of Ba'athi dictatorship
having been lifted from the country ought to count in favor of the
United States, but even that must be deemed a mixed blessing. This
blessing is especially mixed for Sunnis whose ascendancy was
guaranteed by Saddam, and also for those who regard with apprehension
U.S. promises of democratic reforms, which might hand over power to
the Shi'a. On top of it all, the failure of an Arab army, once again,
to put up a respectable fight offers up yet another humiliation, and
humiliation seldom metastasizes into gratitude. At least the Japanese
and the Germans went down fighting, even if in defense of discredited
causes, and could console themselves that they had succumbed to force
majeure.

In contrast, Gulf War II has not discredited pan-Arabism along with
Ba'athism, nor put to rest Saddam's promise to liberate Jerusalem
like a modern-day Saladin. Saddam may be gone, but similar
ideological incantations continue to cast a spell over the Arab
imagination. As a result of all this, America cannot be easily viewed
as a liberator. The Iraqi body politic sees itself as having been a
victim of European colonialism, and it sees the Anglo-American
occupation as its second coming.

So do most of Iraq's neighbors. After all, in 1945 the United States
defeated and occupied not the colonized, but the colonizers. After
1945, the neighbors of both Japan and Germany were delighted to have
Washington park its troops on and democratize two bullies who had
disturbed the peace more or less continuously since the 1870s. But
Iraq's neighbors, even those secretly grateful to Washington for
having executed Saddam's regime, regard a prolonged U.S. presence in
Iraq with dread--although not all for the same reasons. Turkey fears
that the Americans have kicked over the anthill of Kurdish autonomy.
The Gulf states fear that Saddam's demise will redound to Tehran's
benefit. American troops bivouacked within a Scud's throw of Islam's
holiest sites hoist a red flag in a place--Saudi Arabia--where
religious toleration is an alien concept. Local and regional mistrust
of American motives and the American presence will make it difficult
to concentrate on the issue of democratizing Iraq, especially if
resentment erupts into attacks that create security issues for
coalition forces. Thus, rather than having a situation, like the
Soviet threat, that drives Iraqis toward American protection and
values, the external situation around postwar Iraq is precisely the
reverse. It will feed Iraqi opposition to the occupation.

Stability and progress

Our fourth dilemma will be to reconcile the need for stability with that of "renewal" and "democratization." Unlike World War II, when the Allies viewed the defeated populations as accessories to a criminal regime, the Coalition views most Iraqis as Saddam's unenthusiastic victims. Nevertheless, criminals must be punished and the iron grip of the Ba'ath Party over Iraq's public life shattered.

The war crimes trials that took place at Nuremberg between 1945 and 1949 and in Tokyo from 1946 to 1948 aimed, in the words of Secretary of Defense Henry Stimson, to demonstrate "the ineradicable stain their leaders had put on their name among nations", and "to make it impossible for anyone ever to say in times to come, 'Oh, it never happened--just a lot of propaganda--a pack of lies.'" Unfortunately, the post-1945 trials came to be seen by the German and Japanese populations not as the first step in a "re-education" process, but as "victor's justice" and "exercises in revenge." A nation that had flattened German and Japanese cities, dropped the atom bomb (twice), and killed hundreds of thousands of women and children was in no position, the "liberated" argued, to accuse others of "crimes against humanity."

That was only the half of it. In the eyes of many Germans, Russian judges at Nuremberg represented a Soviet government whose troops had carried out systematic, mass rapes in eastern Germany, expelled millions of German nationals and ethnic Germans from East Prussia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary under horrendous conditions, and amputated approximately one-quarter of Germany's prewar territory. Their presence introduced a cynical and sour note of moral ambiguity into the proceedings.

In theory, the situation should be different in Iraq. Despite the images of innocents suffering death and chaos presented in the Arab media, the overthrow of Saddam was accomplished with a minimum of collateral damage, at least by World War II standards. Baghdad war crimes trials will be directed at Ba'athis accused of crimes against other Iraqis. Nevertheless, trials will be carried out against a backdrop of anger in the Arab world over un sanctions that allegedly caused the deaths of thousands of Iraqi innocents. Questions about the motivation and legitimacy of Coalition intervention may pose legal conundrums, too. And Sunnis, who benefited most from Saddam's rule, may interpret war crimes trials as Kurdish and Shi'a revenge for their domination of Iraq (and well they might be).

The administration has wisely promised to allow Iraqis to judge their own leaders. But even this does not guarantee the justice or legitimacy that will allow Iraq to turn a new page. "Key leaders" will surely seek to portray themselves as victims, like those Japanese and German war criminals able to garner public sympathy by insisting that they had made the "patriotic choice" of defending their country. ss General "Panzer" Meyer, convicted by an American court of the murder of Canadian POW's, was given a torchlight parade and a telegram of congratulation from the West German head of state when a German court released him short of serving his full sentence. In order to prevent a permanently disaffected class of people, similar to the sort that had destabilized interwar Germany, from congealing around opposition to occupation policy--and also in order to build up a political constituency for a moderate Federal Republic--Adenauer re-integrated men into the government who had "very bad political records." He even went so far as to restore the pension rights of former Nazi officials and  SS men.

In Iraq, senior Ba'athi officials and Republican Guard officers will no doubt insist that, without their vigilance, Sunni domination of Iraq would have been compromised and Iraq dismembered by Iran.

A "truth and reconciliation" process considered by the administration is presumably meant to avoid the "judicial chaos" produced by trials of "B-" and "C-class" criminals in Germany. These committees will replicate to a degree German Spruchkammern, an AMG version of magistrate's courts made up of citizens able to hand out small fines or days of "rubble clearing" to "lesser offenders" and "followers."

This sounds sensible, but as the German experience shows, the risk of this process is to transform criminals into "patriotic martyrs" and cause the procedure to rebound against those willing to collaborate with the international community. "In 1945 it was hard to find a German who admitted that he had been a devout Nazi", wrote Constantine FitzGibbon, an American officer who served in Germany's AMG. "In 1955, it was equally hard to find one who would admit that he had served on a de-nazification court, for many who had were socially ostracized or economically penalized in their own communities." Post-Saddam Iraq can be expected to follow postwar Germany in this regard, producing "patriotic martyrs" on an industrial scale while staunch Ba'athists of Saddam's Iraq become as rare as hen's teeth--at least in the short term. That is precisely what is likely to become of some 30,000 Ba'ath Party officials and members now barred from public service: they will become a kinship of patriotic martyrs, at least for Iraq's Sunnis, a community skilled at both administration and the potential production of mayhem. Many suddenly unemployed army officers may join them.

The flawed assumption that underlay post-1945 nation-building was that democracy constitutes the natural reflex of peoples liberated from suffocating tyranny. However, "democratization" of the civil service, judicial and education systems in postwar Japan and Germany proved to be beyond American capacities. MacArthur's "top-down" nation-building style, the retention of Emperor Hirohito and the assumption by Supreme Command Allied Powers (SCAP) that the Japanese were an "obedient herd" actually strengthened the grip of the Japanese bureaucracy and helped to socialize the Japanese to "the acceptance of authority." A powerful bureaucratic culture, the requirement to enlist German jurists to serve the numerous postwar trials, an ingrained belief in the superiority of the German education system, and administrative sabotage of Allied-imposed reforms all combined to impair attempts to shatter the steel grip of German official attitudes and practices. In effect, stability came first, progress later.

Nor did demands for reform rise up from demoralized, apathetic populations accustomed to leaving government to their "betters." Expecting Coalition-induced winds of change to whistle through a bureaucratic Ba'athi state appears to replicate the naive assumptions of 1945. The good news is that, over thirty years, German and Japanese bureaucrats became loyal servants of their respective democracies. The lesson of 1945, therefore, is that reform emphasis should be placed on creating a better state rather than tinkering with civil service culture and personnel.

The benefit of de-Ba'athification will be that, like war crimes trials, it will put on record that to have served Saddam and his party was to have participated in a criminal enterprise. However, formal de-Ba'athification is likely to be so complex that it is probably not worth attempting. As in the 1945 cases, de-ideologization will take care of itself.

The de-nazification of Germany really began in 1943, as news of the fall of Stalingrad and Tunis and the defection of Italy served notice on the Germans that defeat was only a matter of time, seriously eroding the Hitler myth. "A widespread revulsion to the war and all things associated with it had sunk deep into the German psyche", conclude two historians of postwar Germany, who argue that Nazism was already extinguished by May 1945 even if nationalist fealty to Hitler was not.

The same was true of Japan. By the time U.S. troops set foot in the home islands, the Japanese were fed up with the war, Japanese soldiers were deserting, and the military was generally loathed by the population. Many Germans and Japanese were eager to see those responsible for the war punished. But clumsy AMG/SCAP attempts to assign culpability for Axis aggression and crimes to entire populations, and to make them "work their passage" through forced labor, served in the short term to create a "community of opposition to anything imported by the occupation."It seemed as if Germans especially had lost the war and yet kept the Nazis.

Similarly, the disastrous wars against Iran and the Allied coalition, followed by ten years of sanctions and then the disappearance of Saddam, mean that Iraq is already psychologically de-Ba'athified, the population disillusioned, and the "Saddam myth" discredited. The Ba'ath Party was neither socially nor ideologically homogenous, and it had become a sanctuary for opportunists, the unscrupulous, the ambitious and the tremulous. Its defining ideology was hardly more than transparent propaganda. Its only binding principle was its collective culpability in assisting Saddam's human rights abuses. The Iraqi dictator found the party to be the weak reed of his regime after the Gulf War. He relied instead for support on his family, those from his village of Tikrit and other Sunni tribesmen. The Ba'ath Party served primarily to assist the secret police to control the population.

This suggests that de-Ba'athification without any edict proclaiming it would have been relatively easy. The party would have withered away without much effort. The vast majority of the 1.5 million party members, therefore, should be left in peace so long as they have not committed crimes. De-nazification, after all, proved to be a misplaced policy. The goal should be to punish the regime's higher echelons and those who committed crimes against other Iraqis, not to set some arbitrary number and make proclamations about who is and is not entitled to serve the public.

Against this view, we are bound to hear the argument that Saddam could not have carried out his criminal activities without the collaboration of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi police, civil servants, teachers, soldiers, jurists and businessmen. Denunciations, for which the police and secret services offered bounties, lubricated the Ba'athi state. How many people disappeared into Saddam's prisons, how many deserters had their ears severed, because a neighbor sought revenge or looked to ingratiate himself with local authorities? There are plenty of scores to be settled on these and other grounds, so it remains to be seen whether pressure by vengeful emigres, Kurds and Shi'a, and the demands of the U.S. Congress, for purges and trials of Saddam's Ba'athi supporters will prove irresistible. They very well may.

If such trials do take place en masse, it will leave the American occupiers with a dilemma. If we really launch into a wholesale purge of Ba'athi Iraq, we risk replicating the same confusion over defining behavior and attitudes, the same summary judgments, settling of scores and petty injustices as occurred in Germany. In that case, a cumbersome classification system for Nazi suspects was buttressed by the notorious Fragenbogen, lengthy questionnaires in which Germans had to prove that they had been neither party members nor accomplices in Nazi crimes. In this case, the impression that the American occupation is neither as "neutral" nor as "liberating" as claimed will be confirmed.

As in Germany, we also may find it difficult to purge Iraq's administration and simultaneously run the country. Hardly had World War II ended than the United States had interned 82,000 Nazi Party members and dismissed 100,000 civil servants in the U.S. zone of occupation alone. When questioned about his appointment of Friederich Schafer, a conservative who had been close to the Nazis during the war, as governor of Bavaria, George Patton declared:

more than half the German people were Nazis and we would be in a hell of a fix if we removed all Nazi party members from office. The way I see it, this Nazi thing is very much like a Democratic and Republican election fight.

The press brouhaha that followed Patton's outburst caused Lucius Clay to intensify de-nazification. Roughly 13 million Fragenbogen were eventually completed. Adenauer complained that, if he followed U.S. directives, only citizens over 65 and those under twenty would have the blemish-free records that qualified them for government service. Indeed, although only 58,000 of one million German civil servants eventually lost their jobs, many more were sent on leave without pay or even interned while their cases were being screened. So arbitrary and unjust was the U.S. de-nazification effort considered that it provoked the formation of a society called the "Victims of Denazification", which counted 30,000 members in 1954. In this way, Clay managed to separate the concept of de-nazification from that of justice. It may turn out that the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq will be forced to make so many exceptions among the barred 30,000 that the policy will be effectively neutered.

On the other hand, many Iraqis, especially among the more religious parts of the Shi'a community, believe that all Ba'ath is are culpable and should be punished. The effects of this belief have already emerged, and the U.S. banning of the Ba'ath may be a response to them. If justice is not seen to be done through official channels, a rampant "settling of scores", as occurred in France after 1945, may sweep through Iraq as aggrieved family members and non-Sunni populations take justice into their own hands. That is already happening, as perhaps hundreds of Ba'athi officials have been killed in vigilante and revenge murders.

IN THE FINAL analysis, the United States should allow the Iraqis to carry out their own "de-Ba'athification lite", complete with war crimes trials of Saddam's top henchmen, the better to avoid the complications of the cumbersome post-1945 de-nazification of Germany. An invasive campaign of democratization and cultural engineering will probably spawn resentment and allow opposition politicians to make the U.S. presence the issue. The goal should be to "normalize" Iraq fairly quickly by puffing a responsible leadership cadre in place while retaining a supervisory role with enough soldiers to back it up. This will ensure that Iraq does not slide into chaos. Then, with any luck, as in Germany, the next Iraqi generation will wonder why their parents ever allowed a tyrant like Saddam Hussein to come to power, and vow that it will not happen again in their country.

Douglas Porch is professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. He is currently working on a history of the Mediterranean theater in World War II (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004).