HONG KONG -- History did not repeat itself in Iraq as the Americans naively expected. While it has become obvious that U.S. intelligence reports and analysis were deficient in the runup to the war, less attention has been paid to the fact that the United States occupied Iraq imbued with a dubious historical perspective.
Quite clearly, the occupation of Iraq was premised on the calculation that since the U.S. postwar occupations of West Germany and Japan were a great success, the administration of President George W. Bush would now repeat it.
Of course, it was an absurd assumption. East Asia in 1945 and the Mideast in 2004 are two completely different sets of circumstances. No more than any event in history, the U.S. Occupation of Japan was not an undiluted success.