People have very little historical memory. The facts are: we bombed most large German cities back into the stone age. Millions of civilians were killed or injured, the basic infrastructure of transportation, power plants, even water distribution, destroyed for huge cities like Hamburg, Munich, and Berlin. Germans were litterally starving to death in the months following Hitler's death.
Six months before, the world had cheered as the statues of the dictator came crashing down. The Americans had seemed heroic. But now things were going very badly. The occupation was chaotic, the American soldiers were hated and they were facing threats from the surviving supporters of the dictator, whose whereabouts were uncertain.
Washington seemed unwilling to pay the enormous bill for reconstruction, and the president didn't appear to have any kind of workable plan to manage the transition to democracy. European allies, distrustful of the arrogant American outlook, were wary of co-operating. To many, it looked like the victory had been betrayed, since the American values of democracy, equality and well-being seemed unlikely ever to emerge.
That's how it looked in Germany in November, 1945. In our memories, history tends to become compressed: There was V-E Day, then the American soldiers were cheered by the people of Berlin, then the president announced that hundreds of millions would be spent on the Marshall Plan, then Germany became the prosperous and democratic place it is today.
That is not how things unfolded. The United States has always been good at removing dictators from power, but the tedious, dirty work we now call "nation building" has never come naturally, or quickly. The enormous success of European and Japanese reconstruction did not even begin to emerge until long years of pain and disorder had passed.
Six months after V-E Day, The New York Times reported that Germany was awash in "unrest and lawlessness." More than a million "displaced persons" roamed the country, many of them subsisting on criminal activities. The heavy-handed presence of American soldiers was deeply resented by many Germans, especially young men, who had come to believe that the G.I.s were stealing their women.
... The Marshall Plan, in which the United States spent the equivalent of 100 billion of today's dollars rebuilding Europe, was not passed until late in 1947, more than two years after the war's end, and did not deliver a penny to Germany until 1949. It faced harsh political opposition from Republicans in the United States. The other great instrument of postwar reconstruction, the World Bank, did not begin handing out money until 1947 either.
It took two years for the United States to begin taking its nation-building responsibilities seriously. Those two years hadn't passed well. By 1947, Germans were dying of starvation. In some cities, the ration had dropped to 750 calories. And the aid may never have arrived had it not been for the threat of communism and the promise of profits: The Marshall Plan was sold to Americans as a trade and marketing opportunity for U.S. business, and as a firewall against the Soviets. But whatever the motives, it was the cornerstone of today's Europe, a stunning success
Yes, it would be nice if Iraq was a happy peacefull place immediately after the war ended. Yes our army could be bigger and we could have another division in Iraq doing useful things like securing the border. But the truth is, rebuilding a country is hard work. We are better at it than just about any other country in history, but we still aren't good at it compared to the ideal. Sorry, but we live in the real world.
