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.

If U.S. policy was unclear in Washington, things were no better on the ground in Germany. A fascinating look at this process comes from Decision in Germany, the memoir of Gen. Lucius Clay, the head of the U.S. military government in Germany. Clay argues that Washington did not understand how chaotic the situation in Germany really was in 1945. Clay was indeed in a difficult spot; far from having a clear policy to communicate to both Germans and Americans, he was charged with implementing the relatively punitive directive (JCS-1067) that defined U.S. policy toward Germany. That top-secret directive, by the way, was not made public until October 1945--six months after the German surrender--a situation that would constitute a major public relations disaster were it to happen today.

Security and law-and-order problems were an immediate priority. As Clay describes it, the crime rate was high at the war's end, but all German police had to be vetted. They were disarmed until September 1945, when they were provided with light arms. And, because the Nazis had so corrupted the German justice system, U.S. military-government courts carried out various legal functions for several years in the American sector. Clay recounts a series of steps he took to improve this justice system over time, noting the difficulties of crafting a hybrid for a unique situation.

De-Nazification was highly controversial, both among the occupying forces and in the United States. In the American sector, where it was implemented the most rigorously, German tribunals worked under American supervision. Some 25 percent of the population was judged; some individuals were detained for almost three years before being brought to trial. At one point, Clay defended this process against pressure from a congressional committee calling for its quick termination. Finding the right balance that would allow true political reform, yet not punish unduly those who were only nominally Nazi or create large groups of disenfranchised, excluded, and potentially dangerous opponents of the occupying power was no easier then than it is likely to be now in Iraq.

Nor did the United States have a consistent military plan for Germany. Our first concern, after the German surrender, was to send as many troops as possible to the Far East to fight Japan, or to send them home. Certainly the rapid drawdown weakened our hand in dealing with the Soviet Union on the future of Germany.

During the first three years after the war, U.S. officials expended a great deal of effort trying to work together with the other occupying powers (Britain, France, and the Soviet Union). In retrospect, it is easy to say that the Soviets were never going to cooperate constructively with us in Germany. At the time, however, we were committed to working with them. As a result, senior American officials spent long hours in endless quadripartite meetings that produced little of value. To give just one example, in May 1946, Clay's experts presented him with a plan for currency reform that they considered urgent, given the damage done by raging inflation in Germany. We proceeded with currency reform only in June 1948, more than two years later, when we had decided to do so despite Soviet opposition.

But perhaps the clearest indication that the peace was far from "won" in the first two years was how Secretary of State George C. Marshall described the situation in Germany in a radio talk to Americans in April 1947: "The patient is sinking while the doctors deliberate." Only then did we fund the Marshall Plan.

The record in Germany suggests not that we knew what to do and did it efficiently, but that we succeeded only after struggling for some time over the right policy and then how to implement it. Success in Iraq will likely require the same process.

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This article was first published by the Weekly Standard and is reprinted with permission.