Did Japanese and German insurgents still battle US occupation forces after their surrender? Were there Iraqi-esque incidents of snipers and saboteurs against the American soldiers?
Not on appreciable scale.
OTOH, you’re talking about two countries that had just finished 6-7 years of constant warfare, the last 2-3 of which involved their major cities being decimated by superior force, and both of which faced strong occupation (especially Germany, both halves).
Contrast this to Iraq, which fought for about a week with a few nights of heavy bombing, a weak occupation force (less than 200,000 soldiers for 20-25 million civilians, with no police forces), and is surrounded by “hostile” countries sending in weapons and fighters.
I would say that the culture of both Germans and Japanese lend themselves to obedience to whatever lawful authorities happen to be in place, while Arab society is more tribal and religious, suspicious of centralized government and resentful of all-too-frequent outside interference.
The Iraqis had been living under a sloppy, inefficient dictator for 30 years. Most (especially those around Baghdad where so much trouble is taking place) were merely pacified under Saddam. They exploded into mayhem and disorder the second the restraints were lifted, since the government hadn’t been very structured.
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan lived under highly structured and regimented societies they were really into. Once their leadership was decapitated (so to speak), they just kinda ground to a halt and easily slipped into the new leadership.
It also “helped” that the Nazi Germans had that whole holocaust thing to explain, and fell out of favor rather quickly. The Soviet side was just brutally repressed. The Japanese… well, if you can explain anything the Japanese do at all, that’d be sweet. 
No, though Rumsfeld and others have implied that it did by conflating the activities of German wartime guerillas with the ‘post-war’ Iraqi insurgency. RAND’s * America’s Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq* lists postwar US fatalities in Germany and Japan as exactly zero. There’s an old threat on the subject here.
Saddam sloppy and inefficient? Absolute nonsense. Zagadka, you should know better.
Iraq was one of the world’s most tightly controlled and spy-infested police states. Hundreds of thousands of people worked for the various security organs, and citizens were urged to inform on their friends and families - many did. The security organs themselves were set up so as to spy on each other, and led by people of absolute loyalty to Saddam, mostly relatives. There was no room for dissent in the areas Saddam controlled.
Iraq was a far more regimented and tightly policed state than Nazi Germany, for example, whose domestic (ie in Germany proper, not in the occupied territories) security organs, while powerful by any other standard, still had far less control than in Ba’athist Iraq. I don’t know a great deal about Japanese society, so I won’t comment on that.
You might argue that German and Japanese citizens were more loyal to their governments and therefore had a loyalty vaccuum when the upper leadership died / was captured, whereas Iraqis had different allegiances and beliefs that came bubbling to the surface when the government was deposed. But if anything, that proves how tightly Saddam held the reins of government.
Maybe in some respects. In most, it was a festering shithole. The power plant in Baghdad, for example, is operating at 10% capacity because it is so badly deteriorated. The water supply (no functioning water treatment plants, partly because of the sanctions, mostly because Saddam - or his officers - couldn’t keep them running), the roads, the industry, the oil plants all have to be retrofitted. Most of the country was run by the old method of people telling him that things worked when they didn’t, because they were so afraid. He couldn’t even gas the Kurds effectively. The past 10 years have not been kind to Iraq, and most of Saddam’s power was a ghost of what it was when he took over. Nothing worked, not even his army.
Half of our problem (well, the part that isn’t the appalling lack of security) is that Iraq is more badly degraded than we ever imagined, and rehauling its infrastructure is going to take YEARS longer than expected (it doens’t help that foreign contractors have fled the country). We can’t even start our rebuilding programs, because there is no building infrastructure.
Iraq was anything BUT a “regimented and tightly policed state”. You do severe discredit to the Nazis by saying that Saddam ran a tighter police state than them (as much as that sentence makes me want to gag on my own vomit).
By 2002, Saddam could barely keep Baghdad running, much less project power. It was and remains a decrepit state that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to repair from two decades of neglect.
First, your argument is a non-sequitur. Saddam’s ability to supply water and electricity to the populace has nothing to do with his ability to suppress dissent and murder dissidents.
Also, your description of Saddam’s rule is incorrect. Saddam actually ran the country efficiently, in a fascist make-the-trains-run-on-time way, up until the First Gulf War. There were schools, water and electricity supplies, roads and so on. This is not to say that Saddam was a good person in any way, or that Iraq was a good place to live - hundreds of thousands were being killed or put in camps and prisons - but your statement that the state was in better shape in '68 and that Saddam ran it into the ground (I paraphrase) is entirely incorrect.
After the 2nd Gulf War, the sanctions and the regular bombing of the next decade, Iraq’s schools, roads, oil facilities, water and power supplies and so on were reduced to rubble. But this was not Saddam’s fault (not directly at least, one might say that he caused this by his invasion of Kuwait). However, this had nothing to do with inefficiency on the regime’s part and everything to do with bombs, sanctions and a greatly reduced budget.
Yet before and after the 2nd Gulf War (ie the invasion of Kuwait), Saddam’s internal security apparatus could never be described as “sloppy and inefficient”. Consider the numbers of security staff and overlapping agencies, the home-front inform-on-your neighbours campaigns, the number of people killed, tortured and languishing in jail. Read up on the Mukhabarat, the Amn-i Khas and the other revolting agencies and their practices. Take a look at the massacres of the Kurds and Shiites before and after the 2nd Gulf War. Consider Saddam’s own origin as a thug and enforcer, his instinctive fear and insecurity, his rise to power through his control of the security organs and his wholesale murder of any possible rivals. Consider above all the fact that in the bombed-out ruin that was 90s Iraq, the government still had tight control over the areas where its security forces were in operation.
Post-Gulf-War Iraq was certainly a ruin, but its security forces would be second only to those of Stalin’s USSR in some monstrous league-table. They had to be - by the end of the 90s, the Iraqi people largely hated and feared Saddam and would have taken him down if at all possible.
In comparison, Germany was far more internally coherent, and its disgusting security forces were largely afield murdering Jews, homosexuals, gypsys and Russians, rather than strictly enforcing security within Germany proper. It’s true that there was more strict security later in the war, for example after the Stauffenberg plot, but such a ploy wouldn’t have been at all possible in Saddam’s Iraq at any time. We can squabble over the power of Germany’s security apparatus all we want, but your thesis that Saddam was sloppy and inefficient in his control of the populace simply does not hold water.
I don’t dispute that, he did hold down the dissenters. Hence, I said “Most … were merely pacified under Saddam. They exploded into mayhem and disorder the second the restraints were lifted, since the government hadn’t been very structured.”
That doesn’t take a helluva lot of organization, and his ability to project power beyond Baghdad by 2002 wasn’t all that great. Obviously, not even his guardsmen stood by him when the chips were on the table. His government, security forces, police state, everything collapsed like the house of cards it was.
Granted, but we are talking post-GW1 Iraq. I thought that was self-evident.
I don’t see how their behaviour after the restraints are lifted betrays a lack of structure in the government. And “mere pacification”, of Iraq or of any other nation, isn’t an easy thing to do, as the US troops are discovering - it requires political control, police control, and in the case of Saddam, massive security systems. It DOES “take a helluva lot of organization”, certainly far more than 200,000 of the best troops in the world, as we can see. And in Saddam’s Iraq, there WAS a helluva lot of security organization, regardless of the crappiness of the water supplies and so on.
If you contend that Saddam’s security systems weren’t immensely powerful, and that he wasn’t able to project power over all Iraq except the northern no-fly zone, prove it. Let’s see some cites about the Shiites running wild and Saddam’s security systems crumbling.
Because until the Americans invaded, Saddam was in control of 90% of the country, despite the shittiness of life in everyday Iraq, and despite the fact that most of the population hated him. He did this through massive security systems that policed the populace, the army and each other, and which were capable of controlling Basra just as strongly as they controlled Baghdad.
His security system collapsed in the face of the American assault, and the populace went wild at the same time. Once you remove the security system, the place certainly was a house of cards, as you say, but surely that’s more evidence of the strength of the security system - its ability to hold the entire country together.
That’s actually an error in my post. I meant to say “up until the Second Gulf War”. The trains were running on time, so to speak, throughout the First Gulf War (ie the Iran-Iraq War), and these civilian systems weren’t ruined until after the Second Gulf War (ie the invasion of Iraq and the UN-mandated response).
In reply to lambchops (quote:Saddam actually ran the country efficiently, in a fascist make-the-trains-run-on-time way, up until the First Gulf War):
which follows your previous:
Just to point out the difference with Japan, a surrender was negotiated and accepted with the ruling Japanese authorities, so there was an official transfer of power. Not sure how that worked in Germany, but as stated the Germans had to have been pretty well subdued. Also remember Germany is a country of people that pretty much follow the rules, whosever they are.
Before the Gulf War, I read something that said that the post-war German insurgency movement numbered at most in the dozens. The German population in general was extremely hostile to the insugents, and the rebels (all hardcore Nazis) didn’t accomplish much of anything.
In Japan, after the emperor himself told them to cease resistance, post-war rebellion was practically nil.
Wish I could point you to a cite, but I don’t remember the source.
The best way to avoid a post-war insurgency is not to win too quickly. I mean it! Let the opposition keep on fighting you conventionally for three or four years. Let them try everything, make every effort and sacrifice they can. Until all the die-hards have died hard, and the survivors are sick of war and dispair of further resistance.
In the American Civil War, if the Union had won too quickly, if the Confederacy hadn’t fought itself into utter exhaustion and collapse, the partisan resistance might have lasted until the turn of the 20th century.
Apart from people being simply sick of war, one major factor IMO might be the stated reasons for the occupation.
in Germany: “You invaded. We invaded back. Now we are here to make sure. in our own interest, that you don’t do it again”.
in Japan: ditto.
in Iraq: “We made war on you for your own good”.
In the first two cases the stated reason was a honest one that the people could believe (they did not need to like it), and cooperating in the mutual interest was the obvious way to get the occupation lifted. In the third case the stated reason was obviously ludicrous.
Did Iraq ever really surrender?
But that approach would also cost the victor a lot more in blood and treasure. And the longer the war drags on, the harder it is for the government to maintain political support for it. (The American rebels defeated the British, not by winning decisive victories in the field – they won very few before Yorktown – but by avoiding decisive defeats, prolonging the war until the British were sick of it and ready to give up.) The Bush Admin wanted and needed a quick victory.