It tickles my brain in a strange way that the Americans did such a pissweak job of de-nazification after WWII (deliberately so in many ways) and it worked out great for the empire.

But after toppling Saddam, they did a much better job of removing every member of the Ba’ath party from civilian and military power, and it turned into a disaster.

I’ve been turning it over it my head, what was incompetence, what was deliberate, how these two distinct yet similar events played out. Was it simply a matter of the management of empire becoming less competent over time? Would full denazification have caused similar issues in postwar Germany (the experience of the GDR suggests not)?

Very interesting to think about.