This Will Take A Long Time

You cannot tell after three months of an occupation how things will turn out. The Marshall Plan, she reminds, was a response to Europe's humanitarian and economic crisis three years after the war ended. That plan expressed the belief that if great-power wars were to end, there must be a different kind of Germany -- and Japan.

Reconstituting Iraq is in some ways more difficult than the tasks America took up in 1945. Both Germany and Japan had been rendered almost clean slates, politically -- thoroughly defeated by protracted war, their old elites had been destroyed. And as Henry Kissinger remembers, the obedience of Germans in the American, British and French occupation zones was encouraged by the example of the terrible alternative -- the Soviet zone.

Those who in 1991 favored going beyond the liberation of Kuwait to the capture of Baghdad cheerfully foresaw a ``MacArthur regency'' for Iraq akin to Gen. Douglas MacArthur's governance of Japan in 1945. But who would have played MacArthur?

In ``American Caesar,'' biographer William Manchester noted that MacArthur had lived in the Orient for decades, ``had studied Nipponese folklore, politics and economy; most of all he had pondered how (Emperor) Hirohito's people lived, worked and thought.'' When Hirohito suddenly repudiated what he called ``the false conception that the Emperor is divine and that the Japanese are superior to other races and fated to rule the world'' -- the myth for which 1.3 million soldiers and 672,000 civilians had died -- this created, MacArthur said, ``a complete vacuum, morally, mentally and physically.'' Apathy reigned.

Apathy is not the primary problem in Iraq. Rice wonders: What would it have been like reconstituting Germany and Japan in today's media environment, on a daily news cycle?

One might add: or with Iraq's kind of violence, which neither occupied Germany nor Japan knew in 1945.