He's right of course that there was huge damage in Germany that needed repairing - and his argument that it gave the Germans something to do other than fomenting against the occupiers is a valid one.

My own point doesn't really contradict that, and focuses not so much on how much or how little was destroyed in the war itself, but rather on how much the people had when the war was over. The Germans had a strong economy, a strong civil society, long established traditions of the rule of law and so on - and the war destroyed some of that, but still much of it remained - remained actually standing, or remained in the memories of the people who could rebuild it. Perhaps less was destroyed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but considering how much less they had beforehand, they still came out of those wars rather worse off than the Germans.

It most definitely does mean that post-war Germany had less ethnic strife than Afghanistan or Iraq. I'm not sure if you really meant to say what you said there, because it seems so nonsensical. Post-war Germany had little or nothing in the way of ethnic strife, rivalry or power struggles between ethnic groups - the only major thing they had was what I mentioned, displaced Germans who were driven from their homes in Silesia (or Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, or Siebenbürgen in Romania). Iraq and Afghanistan, well, I don't think I even need to start.

Afghans hadn't been systematically indoctrinated over a longer period, true - but growing up in little more than anarchy doesn't exactly leave people open and welcoming of democracy, either, and the growing group of Afghans under the Taliban yoke certainly did face what you might call indoctrination. The Iraqis lived in a dictatorship of their own, they certainly had indoctrination as well.

But indeed, that's not even really what I'm talking about. A generation being indoctrinated is not something you can just sweep under the map, okay, but when the older generations at least remember how it was before, have an example to return to, they should be able to manage, after a fashion. Iraqis and Afghans had been under dictatorships, anarchy, Soviet domination or some combination of the three for decades and decades, with liberal amounts of bloody war thrown in for good measure - and even before that, they had never had a period of a well-functioning even semi-democratic state that could serve as an example. Germany and Japan had, and it wasn't all that long ago. Moreover, you have the "clash of civilizations" thing going on, the general feeling in the Muslim world of being under siege, their lingering resentment about the colonization and their backward position since a century or two, three. For Japan the same thing was probably true to a considerable extent (like I said, I know rather little about Japan), but not for Germany.

I'm 25 (barely), not 30, and I remember the pre-WTC period quite well, thank you. Yes, people who faced Nazi indoctrination from the beginning, had little else in school and all - those born after 1925 or so, say - would need quite strongly anti-Nazi parents to not be swayed. But those people were never going to be the ones leading Germany when the war ended - and by the time that generation did come to power, they'd had enough time for the indoctrination to melt away.

It reminds me of a factor I hadn't yet considered but that is quite relevant: demographics, and more specifically the amount of easily influenced youths out there (and they count double if they're unemployed). Germany post-WW2 was probably in a less extreme situation than either Iraq or Afghanistan with regards to the weight of the youth in the population statistics, in any case; and then of course millions of them had died in the war. Iraqi or Afghanistani youths didn't really die in significant numbers during the brief wars that left them under American control (they had died in large numbers in earlier wars, to be sure, but those were ten or twenty years before).


It's not that I have something against imposing martial law. I'm just saying, it's absurd to pretend that "nation-building" in Iraq or Afghanistan was ever going to be like post-war Germany and Japan. There was far more "nation" to "build", and so it would always have taken far longer - in a time and under circumstances that made extended military occupations harder.

Konrad Adenauer became Chancellor of West-Germany in 1949, and could govern quite effectively, over a country that would rapidly become the "economic miracle" of Europe, building on its highly educated workforce, its strong civil society and what remained of its industry (East-Germany is of course a different story, but that's the Soviets' fault). Only a madman could ever have expected something similar to happen in Iraq or Afghanistan, countries that were left an utter mess after those wars, with heavy ethnic strife, little in the way of economic assets other than the Iraqi oil industry, and large amounts of disaffected, unemployed and ill-educated youth.