The Japanese and Germans did, so why should the Baathists be any different? "YOUR COUNTRY sinks beneath Jewish-Anglo-American bombs. Your parents lie amid the ruins. Come avenge them." That might be a quote from the Iraqi information minister; it comes in fact from a leaflet printed by the SS and discovered in liberated Cologne, March 1945. The similarities between Iraq on the one hand, and Nazi Germany and wartime Japan on the other, are deep and important. If we take them seriously, they strengthen our convictions and change our expectations about the Iraq war. Many of the war's supporters expected...