Letters: Mar. 31, 2003

The Bush administration's idea of modeling a postwar Iraq on the examples of Japan and Germany after World War II [COVER STORY, March 10] is naive. It took years of occupation to rebuild those countries, and Iraq is more akin to Yugoslavia than to Japan. Yugoslavia and Iraq were cobbled together from multiple states of losing empires (Austrian and Ottoman, respectively) after World War I. Even 20 years of U.S. occupation of Iraq, I suspect, would just delay the inevitable wars of secession and ethnic conflict there. I also suspect that future Presidents would not want to spend the money to...

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