Sorry About Dresden

More from the “if we keep making up crazy stories, they’ll stop complaining” department:

“There is an understandable tendency to look back on America’s experience in postwar Germany and see only the successes,” Ms. Rice said, noting that the Allied-occupied nation was neither stable nor prosperous between 1945 and 1947. “SS officers, called Werewolves, engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them, much like today’s Baathist and Fedayeen remnants.

Donald Rumseld added a helpful example in his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention last week:

One group of those dead-enders was known as “werewolves.” They and other Nazi regime remnants targeted allied soldiers and they targeted Germans who cooperated with the allied forces. Mayors were assassinated including the American appointed Mayor of Achen, the first major German city to be liberated.

On the surface, this seems like a fairly reasonable comparison, although it could be pointed out that the situation in Germany was vastly different to Iraq (Iraq never had an equivalent of Dresden, for example, and the US domination of the Coalition meant that there was no squabbling over how to split Iraq up, unlike the convoluted plans partitioning Germany).

Unfortunately, as this article at Slate points out, this latest damage-control exercise is grounded more in fiction and the dreams of Goebbels than what actually happened. Yes, the mayor of Aachen was assassinated. However, the event happened over a month before the Germans surrendered, so it's not quite the same as what's been happening in Iraq. It also appears to be the apogee of the Werwolf's guerilla tactics. In fact, the Germans were happy to cooperate with the incoming Allied forces (according to a RAND report referenced in the article - it's in the "Lessons Learned" section at the end of the file), with very few reports of resistance or sabotage.

It's hard for an administration to admit it made had made a slight misjudgement. To be fair, they didn't promise a cakewalk, but they gave hints that the people of Iraq would celebrate the removal of Saddam Hussein, and welcome us with open arms. Many anti-war protestors pointed out that it probably wouldn't be that simple. Unfortunately, it seems that the protestors may have been right, no matter how the US and UK try to tell us otherwise.