A GERMAN FRIEND born in 1941 once recounted that he had been so hungry as a small child that, left unsupervised in the pantry, he ate an entire jar of mustard. The conversation made a strong impression on me, in part because of his bitterness toward the occupying powers that had presided over such conditions. Certainly, it did not match my view of German reconstruction as fast, easy, and successful from the start. Yet that view seems to be the model against which our performance in Iraq is being measured.

But was German reconstruction easy? The historical record shows it was anything but.

German policy was fiercely contested during and after the end of World War II in Washington, with tremendous rifts at the cabinet level between Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. and Secretary of War Henry Stimson, as recounted most recently in "The Conquerors," by Michael Beschloss. The fundamental question that split policymakers was the degree to which Germany should be punished for the war. Morgenthau argued that Germany should be dismembered, turned back into an agricultural country, its industry and thus its potential to wage war largely dismantled. Stimson opposed this, arguing that 30 million people would starve. Nor did he see virtue in splitting Germany into pieces. He believed that a disabled and chaotic Germany, which he felt would surely result from such a policy, would keep all of Europe from recovering from the war. This dispute was not fully resolved when the war ended.