(Originally published in The Hill, March 19th, 2003)

Is there a fatal flaw at the heart of the Bush administration's plans for regime change in Iraq?

Now that the question of war has been settled, the next question is how to win the peace. And whether they championed war or opposed it, virtually everyone now agrees that winning the peace means replacing Saddam Hussein's regime with a democratic, pro-western government in Baghdad.

The debate over whether this is feasible has focused mainly on America's successful efforts to rebuild Japan and Germany after World War II. The United States took two countries with deeply authoritarian and militaristic political cultures and, in less than a decade, transformed them into functioning, non-threatening democracies that have remained so until the present day.

When pundits debate whether the same is possible in Iraq, they almost always focus on two key questions: What came before the war and what comes after.

"What came before" is the history and political culture of the country in question. In retrospect, we now see that Japan and Germany were already advanced industrial nations with widespread literacy and other sources of potential prosperity that proved to be key ingredients to future democracy and stability. Yet a lot of people at the time didn't think democracy stood a chance in either place. On the surface, Iraq's history of brutal strongmen doesn't look too promising. But maybe that pessimism will prove equally ill-founded.

The second question is what comes after the war: How long are we willing to stay and how much are we willing to invest? If we cut and run or try to do the job on the cheap (as we have in Afghanistan), there's little reason to think we will be successful.
These are both key questions. But they leave out what is possibly the most important part of the equation: what happens during the war.

Not only did millions of Japanese and Germans die in World War II, but U.S. and British aerial bombing of major Japanese and German cities alone killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in what is now delicately termed "collateral damage." And that's not even counting the carnage caused by the atomic bombs we. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the final days of the war against Japan.

My point here isn't to question the justice of America's war against the Axis powers or how we chose to wage it. Japan and Germany brought the war on themselves. Their occupations and bombings of China and Eastern Europe, respectively, were almost infinitely more brutal. They were fascist regimes that had to be destroyed and we were trying to do so as quickly as possible. But we shouldn't ignore these facts about what happened during the war if we want to understand the 'hows' and 'whys' of what came after.

Violence, death and destruction on such a massive scale have a profound conditioning effect on the psyches of individuals. And the same applies to whole nations. Japan and Germany weren't just 'defeated' or 'occupied,' they were crushed - not just their armies, but their civilian populations too. This led to a sort of national humiliation and a transformative willingness to embrace defeat and change.

True defeat changes people and nations too. The fact that our subsequent occupation turned out to be so benign was extremely important. But part of that importance was the contrast between how much these populations had suffered during the war and how much better things got for them after we took over.

And thus our problem. If everything goes according to plan, the loss of civilian life in Iraq will be minimal. Certainly, we all hope so. We'd be even happier if most of the Iraqi army simply laid down its arms when our ground troops march on Baghdad. In addition to our humanitarian interest in shedding as little blood as possible, a low death toll is key to convincing Iraqis and the rest of the Arab world that we are liberators, not conquerors or destroyers. In short, it's key to making our invasion seem like a good thing.

But that's the catch. Occupying armies will always keep things under control in the short-term. But the sort of transformation we engineered in the former Axis powers required a far greater pliancy, one which allowed us not only to disarm these countries but rewrite their textbooks, reorient their politics, and do much more. Doing that in a foreign country may require a mauling of the civilian population that we are rightly unwilling to undertake.