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The United States has more than 100 years of experience in occupying and reconstructing conquered lands -- from the post-Civil War South to Kosovo. An incomplete list includes its own rebellious...

The United States has more than 100 years of experience in occupying and reconstructing conquered lands -- from the post-Civil War South to Kosovo. An incomplete list includes its own rebellious South following the American Civil War, the Philippines, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Kosovo and most recently Afghanistan.

However, Washington rarely has faced major resistance to such past occupations, which might not be the case in a post-war Iraq. And looking to these examples to help forecast events in Iraq is not heartening from a U.S. perspective. The United States has been most successful either when it or some other power utterly destroyed the country in question prior to U.S. occupation, or when the country was substantially weakened and faced a strong hostile neighbor, rendering a U.S. defensive occupation desirable.

For instance, Germany's cities and industrial base were flattened in World War II, as was Korea from 1950 to 1953. Bosnia was shredded by its civil war, and the U.S. Air Force heavily damaged Serbian industry in Operation Allied Force. On the second point, Japan's failure to raise a conventional military for 50 years was due more to U.S. willingness to defend it against the Soviet Union and China than to any deep moral enlightenment on Tokyo's part.