One Other Reason the Germany Analogy is Stupid…

The conquest of Germany and Japan was not, in the largest sense, motivated by the belief that the German and Japanese people needed to be liberated from tyranny. We were happy enough to “liberate” them, but surely the Soviet Union was far more tyrannical than either in a domestic sense. Rather, Germany and Japan were conquered because both presented grave threats to international order and, in a very real sense, to civilization as we understood it. As such, nobody really cared what the Germans and the Japanese thought about being occupied, at least in the early days. Everyone knew that the German and Japanese puppet regimes would happily accept the military installations we installed in their countries, and no one was overly bothered by what the random Hans and Akira on the street thought about it.

Since 2003, the liberation of the Iraqi people from tyranny has become the sole plausible (and I use that term in the broadest sense possible) justification for the invasion of Iraq. As such, there’s rather a contradiction inherent in the project of creating a puppet state in order to legalize a long term military occupation that, by all evidence available, seems to be strongly opposed by a substantial majority of the Iraqi population.

The problem is this; if you say you’re liberating people, you have to make some allowance for what they do with their liberty.