Germany after WWII

I, for one, don't see any comparison whatever between the situation in Germany in 1945 and Iraq in 2003.

(1) The defeat of Hitler followed a grueling, drawn-out four-year war. The German people were every bit as tired of the war as the victorious, but exhausted, Allies. Any commited Nazis who weren't either dead or captured were running and seeking hideouts with no thought of resurrecting the Third Reich by sabotage. None of this is true in Iraq,

(2) The rebuilding of Germany was given an enormous boost by the Marshall Plan. Nothing even remotely comparable has been suggested so far by anyone in the Bush administration.

My parents and I were in Checkoslovakia in the Spring of '45, when the war ended. We spent the next five years in a UN-administered refugee camp in Bavaria before being able to emigrate to the USA in 1950. I was an eyewitness to the miracle of German recovery. A great deal of the credit, of course, goes to the toughness and resiliency of the German Volk themselves, but it would have been a tough row to hoe without the financial aid of the Allies (chiefly the US) and the vision and commitment of men such as Gen. George Marshall and Pres. Harry S. Truman.

There are no such men in the halls of power in Washington, DC today. Bush has good speech-writers, but the argument that Iraq will be rebuilt just as Germany was is specious.

It should be a joke.
It isn't, so it's a farce.

You cannot, absolutely, compare the social organization, the financial and technical skills and the schooling of Germans in 1945 with that of Iraqis in 2003.

Germany could rebuild itself also because it got engrained in the regional boom brought by the Marshall Plan. Iraq cannot count on that.

The Marshall Plan wasn't everything. Even if it grew at a much slower rate than the BRD (West Germany), the DDR (East Germany) was, for several decades, the must advanced nation of Comecon. The German people are the reason, more than any economic plan.

Furthermore, any attempt of comparing George Bush with the great Franklin Delano Roosevelt -or with Harry Truman- is an attempt against intelligence and common sense.

Much of the influence behind the President's use of the Wirschaftswunder as a justification for American occupation of Iran comes from Rice, who co-authored a book on the rise of Germany in the Cold-War era.
The text, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed : A Study in Statecraft Harvard, 1996, is a monument ot faulty analysis of evidence in order to support a political worldview. Both authors are members of PNAC, and the purpose of the book was to show then President Clinton that it would be possible to "transform" Iraq after an invasion. I read this as an undergraduate in a class on Cold War Foreign Policy, and it was rightly ripped to shreds by my profesor.

Recently watched Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhoff Zoo (in German with FRENCH subtitles, no less...my poor little brain!) and have been pondering whether or not the bleakness that apparently existed in West Berlin can be attributed to its position deep inside the DDR? I know that West Berliners received a subsidy to live there, but for those of you older and more experienced than I, was there really that frantic sense that "the party will end at any moment" that I have read about?