It's an interesting book in general, but sounds like you need to read it among other reasons (the story of the rampage of the 101st in Berchtesgaden is capital) to make clear the vast difference between the occupied German population right after WW2 (or even during the last stages of the war), and the Iraqi and Afghani populations after the wars there. According to Ambrose, the soldiers he's writing about ranked the German civilians as their second favourite nationality to interact with, behind the enthusiastically welcoming Dutch but ahead of the British, French and Belgians - the comfortable German homes that reminded them of their American homes didn't hurt, but they liked the people too.

Some of the large German cities had taken horrific damage, yes, but millions of Germans in smaller cities or out in rural areas, or even in larger cities that got lucky, survived WW2 with really quite limited discomfort - better off than many in the countries they had conquered, for sure. Their society, their institutions, their economic fundamentals - all intact to a considerable degree, and when they weren't, the memories of how it used to work were not so remote that they couldn't rebuild them easily enough, as soon as they found the money for it - which came slowly, and then faster with the Marshall plan. Prior to the Nazi coup d'etat, they had been a democracy, of sorts at least, and that was only 12 years before - not that hard to reinstate it.

And then of course it should be pointed out that they had very little in the way of sectarian or inter-ethnic strife or tension, since those members of the only meaningful minority in pre-war Germany who hadn't fled had mostly been exterminated. The only vaguely related problem they had was the large amount of displaced Germans from Silesia who needed to be resettled in the rest of Germany.

One does wonder why Afghans or Iraqis should feel culpability for wars they didn't start themselves... anyway, though, you could indeed make an argument that it took some time before the Germans really started feeling guilty for the war, and if not for the Holocaust they probably never would have. In my view it was much more about them coming out of the war with much of their civil society and their economic fabric intact, and knowing where to go and what to do. Afghanistan and Iraq post-war were in situations they'd never been in before, with not much in the way of institutions either political or economic to build on, and with enormous sectarian or tribal problems.

I think you probably would agree with that last bit - the part where you're kidding yourself is the part where you seem to think you've done nation-building and mass indoctrination before, in Germany and Japan. You really haven't, nothing like the kind of thing that would be needed in Iraq or Afghanistan.