November 06 2003 at 08:45AM
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By Daniel Jahn
Washington - The United States government has drawn parallels between post-Saddam Hussein Iraq and Germany after World War II, a view historians see as just too audacious from economic, social and political standpoints.
At the end of September, faced with increasing public pressure against the US mission in Iraq, President George Bush said America had "done this kind of work before.
"Following World War II, we lifted up the defeated nations of Japan and Germany and stood with them as they built representative governments," Bush said in his September 27 address to the nation.
'Circumstances in the current situation are so different'
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A number of historians beg to differ.
"The historical settings and the international and local and cultural peculiarities are so different in our two cases ... that even the most imaginative and daring historians would think twice about taking on such a comparative project," believes Christof Mauch of the German Historical Institute in Washington.
"Circumstances in the current situation are so different," Mauch told an audience at a symposium Monday in the US federal capital, held jointly by the institute and the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation.
The US administration appears to proffer such comparisons between Iraq and Germany in order to justify the United States' huge economic and military engagement in Iraq.
As Bush explained in his White House and Quantico speeches of September 14: "We contributed years and resources to this cause" of rebuilding Japan and Germany and in the wake of World War II "that effort has been repaid many times over three generations of friendship and peace."
"US occupiers found an economic infrastructure remarkably intact" in the Germany of the late 1940s, according to historian Rebecca Boehling. "German society as a whole was ethnically homogeneous and of the majority professing a religion almost exclusively Christian."
The situation today in Iraq is not the same, according to James Tent of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "The Iraqi people of 2003 are in an entirely different situation," said Tent. "They really have no experience with democracy."
Especially erroneous in historians' eyes is the comparison between Iraqis leading attacks against US forces and the "Werwoelfe" a secret group founded by the Nazis, as drawn by Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice.
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