I think the major distinction is that the citizens of Japan and Germany knew they had it coming to them in the end. I think there was a national shame associated with the imperialism they'd projected out onto the world.

That's generous of you, but I suspect that if the Axis powers had won the war, and projected themselves across the planet, that they would have had no trouble at all living with themselves. Their imperialism was home-grown, part of their culture at the time, and they were firmly convinced that they had the right to rule the world by force.

Few Germans would have been upset with Hitler if he had won.

As for Iraq, most people don't seem to realize how things used to be different for different classes of people. The analogy is closer to apartheid South Africa than anything else. If you were part of the Baathist/Sunni ruling class, odds are you got along pretty well as long as you stayed firmly away from anything political. Many of those you see on the internet complaining about how good they used to have it come from this class.

If you were from the other areas of Iraq outside of Baghdad, or a Shiite, Kurd, or Marsh Arab, things were very different. These are the people who filled the mass graves, and got the dregs of things like jobs, electricity, sewage, and clean water.

Brutality certainly works in keeping a population in line. That doesn't mean that brutality for decades is a better solution than the difficult struggle of trying to create a freer society. Saddam's abuses are usually heavily suppressed in these discussions, but even in that poll (page 15) that declared that most Iraqis want us to leave Iraq, 61 percent of Iraqis still think ousting Saddam was worth it, including 75 percent of Shiites, 81 percent of Kurds, but only 11 percent of Sunnis (again, for Baathist/Sunnis, think whites in South Africa).

Tito's Yugoslavia used to be a lot quieter, too. Peace is more than an absence of trouble. I have trouble understanding those who truly think Iraq was better off under Saddam.