  Reading urlLink Instapundit , I saw urlLink a blurb from urlLink this Michael Barone column about U.S. media impatience, murmurs of quagmire, and general sniping about the conduct of Iraq's reconstruction. Barone makes some valid points. There is a tendency in the media to amplify the bad and not mention the good. While we constantly read and hear about Falluja, a "Sunni Triangle" town full of resistance to American occupation, we don't see many articles about towns like Diwaniya, urlLink where the occupation has been relatively positive . Barone also writes that, in historical perspective, Iraq's occupation is not going as badly as it is commonly portrayed. Barone mentions the fumbling negotiations at the end of World War I documented in urlLink Paris 1919 and Douglas MacArthur's and Lucius Clay's lack of planning and preparedness for postwar Japan and Germany, respectively.
These are certainly very relevant examples for the Iraq situation. But Barone's historical perspective seems incomplete to me and his column left me thinking, haven't we learned anything about occupation and reconstruction since the end of World War II? I think we have. While improvisation may have been necessary for MacArthur and Clay, I think a lot of thought has been given to reconstruction over the last 50 years. The U.S., Europe, the UN and the rest of the world have had to deal with postwar situations everywhere from Latin America to Southeast Asia, especially in the last 10 years. There are significant amounts of experience and knowledge out there relating to aid, counterinsurgency, policing, and reconstruction, among other things.
If our government had decided to do it, the United States could have had significantly better plans for the occupation of Iraq than it had for its post-World War II occupation efforts. And I believe that would have resulted in a clearly better occupation than the one we are facing now, even if the occupation isn't going as poorly as commonly portrayed. We could have protected the right buildings in Baghdad, better controlled the proliferation of weapons in Iraq, and better transitioned from an army that that propped up Saddam Hussein's army to one that defends Iraq's people. Our poor postwar planning is a strategic error Barone can't explain away through recourse to history. 
