Why did the allies have such little trouble nation-building in Germany and Japan but so much in Iraq?

Most of the resistance in Iraq was Sunni Muslims. Why would it be different if the country was Sunni entirely?

Both were also developed 1st world nations with complete understanding of concepts like parliament, democracy (even if they had rejected it) and freedom. They were also not bound by religion, but most crucially, they were utterly and completely defeated.

Iraq was never really defeated, sure they defeated Saddam, but the insurgency never went away, and that region is just too unstable to begin with.

Modern Japan and Germany are built on strong foundations, but Iraq, literally and figuratively, is built on sand.

The bomb factories were largely in Iran, Shiite. It's more complex than just that.

this desu.
there's a reason that cuckolding is the thinking man's fetish. smarter people like being cucked. it's why the destruction of white peoples is just natural and shouldn't be fought against.

...

>They were also not bound by religion

Wasn't Japan pretty religious? The emperor was literally their god.

>but most crucially, they were utterly and completely defeated.

>Iraq was never really defeated, sure they defeated Saddam, but the insurgency never went away

This basically makes me ask the same question. Why was an insurgency present in Iraq but not Japan?

>Every shitty country just so happens to be resistant to change for some weird reason, maybe if we do the same thing over and over it'll change one day

>Both were also developed 1st world nations with complete understanding of concepts like parliament, democracy (even if they had rejected it) and freedom

This.

Germany and Japan had functional civil services, functional police forces, functional judiciaries, they had almost everything that was necessary for a modern state, with the exception of a parliamentary democracy on top of the pyramid, which the US was able to provide.

Iraq was a failed state long before the US showed up. To paraphrase Hitler, we had only to kick in the door, and the entire rotting structure collapsed upon our heads.

>democracy is good

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>The emperor was literally their god

This worked in our favor though.

Once we flipped the emperor, everyone obeyed us, because obeying the emperor meant obeying us.

> Why was an insurgency present in Iraq but not Japan?

Basically, it all comes down to the strength of the government. Iraq had a government that provided few public services, operated mainly through informal patron-client networks rather than constitutional or bureaucratic channels, and was widely hated and feared.

Japan had a government that was generally trusted and obeyed. In both cases, we inherited these governments as soon as we entered the country.

Of course, the US didn't help the situation in Iraq by disbanding the Iraqi Army and appointing a series of generals (Franks, Sanchez, Casey) who had no idea how to run a country.

>Wasn't Japan pretty religious? The emperor was literally their god.
Asian religions are not the same as western religions, they have never really driven people to extremism or religious violence, they're just guidelines. The Emperor was allowed to keep his position though and that did help.

>Why was an insurgency present in Iraq but not Japan?
Total war coming to an end, people want peace and to rebuild, and two nukes. In Iraq the fight isn't over, the nation wasn't totally ruined, it wasn't broken and the old arguments never died.

WW2 was total and it was final, the Iraq war was in reality a shitty half assed invasion. The US could have (against massive international condemnation of course) gone all in against Iraq and totally wiped out any resistance and brought the country to the brink of destruction. Rebuilding would be much easier from that blank situation, but they couldnt do that obviously.

You could say the same about Vietnam too, if they really, really wanted to, the USA had the men, money and resources to annihilate Vietnamese resistance completely, but of course politics never allows nations to go 100% to war. Only WW1 and WW2 saw that.

Germany and Japan were a great inversion for almost 20 year.
Irak was a few big companies stealing the Iraqis resources.

Thank you both, these are helpful answers.

In your opinions, what could the US have done differently to build Iraq better?

Either dont invade or go all out. Not half assed

First of all, use indigenous institutions a lot more.

There were Iraqi Army commanders with hundreds of thousands of men under their control just waiting for the US to show up and ask them to help restore order, instead the US disbanded the Iraqi Army and overnight there were hundreds of thousands of unemployed, military trained young men who were easy pickings for the insurgents.

In a similar note, don't engage in Debaathification. The fact that denazification didn't work in Germany should have been a dead giveaway. In a totalitarian society, everyone has to join the party, so you can't fire all of the party members from the government without collapsing the government.

The US should have sent a lot more troops and given them a different doctrine. In Iraq, the US deliberately avoided building up troops before the invasion because they wanted to take the Iraqis by surprise and get to Baghdad fasted. It worked, but the end result was that the US didn't have anywhere near enough men in the country to stabilize the country. By contrast, in Germany and Japan, there were vastly more troops per square mile and per citizen, and the troops were able to immediately act as a constabulary force and provide stability for the people in the country.

The constabulary thing is also big, infantry units were turned into what amounted to improvised police forces to keep the peace until regular policing could be established. By contrast, in Iraq US forces were pretty much focused on killing the enemy until Petreaus took over in 2007. From 2003 to 2007, violence continually escalated in Iraq, institutions collapsed, and the US did virtually nothing to stop it. Four years is a long fucking time for a country to be in anarchy.

Sorry if I've written an essay but this topic pisses me off a lot.

Thank you. This is what I was looking for, you're clearly educated on the topic.

>The constabulary thing is also big, infantry units were turned into what amounted to improvised police forces to keep the peace until regular policing could be established. By contrast, in Iraq US forces were pretty much focused on killing the enemy until Petreaus took over in 2007. From 2003 to 2007, violence continually escalated in Iraq, institutions collapsed, and the US did virtually nothing to stop it. Four years is a long fucking time for a country to be in anarchy.

Is there a reason the situation didn't improve much after this? Iraq is still very much in chaos, even before IS.

And did the allies disband the Wehrmacht entirely? There was effectively no Resistance in post-war Germany.

The fire alarm rang while I was typing out my reply and I got delayed by an hour.

Anyway, everything after 2011 is more Maliki's fault than the US's fault.

What happened is, in most Middle Eastern countries, one sect takes over the federal government and shits all over the other ones. Before the coalition it was Saddam and the Sunnis abusing the Shias. After the invasion, it became the Shia abusing the Sunni with Iranian help.

The US mostly pacified the insurgency, but then Al-Maliki ordered US troops out of the country and started abusing the shit out of the Sunni. The end result is that most of the Sunni defected to IS because they viewed ISIS as liberators from the Shia oppression of the Iraqi central government.

The US might have done more to encourage power sharing between the different ethnic groups, specifically by stabilizing the country a little bit earlier and preventing them from slaughtering each other en masse, but the ultimate responsibility for ISIS lies at the hands of the Shia political elites who thought they could rule over the Sunnis at gunpoint rather than reaching a political compromise.

>And did the allies disband the Wehrmacht entirely? There was effectively no Resistance in post-war Germany.

See, here's one advantage we had in WW2. Every German and Japanese person who was willing to die resisting the allies died resisting the allies, because the war lasted so long and there was so much bloodshed on both sides. Very few of the fanatics survived the war.

By contrast, the majority of the Iraqi Army never even saw an American before the government collapsed. This was a deliberate strategy on the part of the US to limit casualties on both sides by bypassing most of the Iraqi military, but it also meant that we didn't spend four years battering the Iraqi Army to dust bit by bit/

>invade a country with the 4th largest standing army on earth
>disband the army
oh gee where did all these armed and trained terrorists come from?

Islam obvs

Germany and Japan are nation-states with a single clearly identifiable ethnic group for whom the country is run by and for. Iraq is a made up country built on nothing.

generally it was a lack of planning.

I think there's a documentary about this: but basically, the bush administration was "winging it".

they hired people who had no idea what they were doing to oversee reconstruction/de-bathification.. and they utterly utterly fucked it up.

troops weren't given the right, or enough equipment from the onset...

it was a mess and stupid, worse the Bush administration didn't even Increase Taxes to pay for the war.