"Historical analogy has been a problem for this administration since the start of the Iraq war in 2003. In the months before the invasion, there was talk of modeling a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq after the successful occupations of Japan and Germany. But even then, historians and analysts were warning against such comparisons, arguing that those were two cohesive societies that were exhausted by years of war and bore little resemblance to the fractured Iraqi society and its potential for internal violence."