Nomen Nescio <nobody@dizum.com> writes:

After WWI the "winners" humiliated the loosers badly. This is one of the main reasons Hitler came to power and got support from the Germans for the aggressions that started the war. He managed to use these feelings of being treated as dogs and paying to heavy for the first war. Also they were very humiliated by the fact that France then occupied part of western Germany.

After WWII the "winners" had learned their lesson from WWI pretty well. Now they did not humilate the people of Germany like after the first war. We got the Mar shal plan and so on.

Unfortunately after GulfWarII the "winners" hadn't learned their lessons from WWII very well. At the end of the war, despite the bombing campaigns, Germany had a vaguely functional administration and (heavily rationed) food, coal, electricity, etc were available. The Allies systematically dismantled all of that, both through apathy (no real planning beyond "Move in and occupy the place") and their zeal to rebuild the country in their own image. For example, they prevented anyone who'd ever been a Nazi party member from doing their job. Well the problem was that to do almost anything, you had to be a party member, so they instantly stopped all civil administration, engineering/maintenance work, teachers, the judicial system, the police, you couldn't even deliver the mail without being a party member (since they were government employees). Virtually every male over the age of about 16 had been in the military and had experience with weapons. So you now had a mass of unemployed ex-military who desperately wanted food and clothing, and had access to an almost infinite supply of weaponry. In addition Germany after the war attracted what one of the allied leaders (Eisenhower?) described as "the scum of Europe", eager to make a quick buck (in Iraq it's folks eager to beat up the infidels). This lead to sizeable pitched battles between the armed gangs and the occupying military, with the military frequently being outgunned by the gangs. Substitute Germany -> Iraq and profit / food -> religion /nationalism and the same situation exists today. Peter.