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This past weekend’s history lesson came in the form of a piece in WaPo about conditions in Germany at the end of WW II. Remember that? It was the good war.

… In 1945, the Allies had a carefully thought-out plan for what would follow victory. For two years before his forces crossed the German frontier, Eisenhower and his staff at Allied headquarters worked on detailed plans for the occupation. The lines of command were clearly drawn, and everyone agreed that the military would be in charge. Thousands of soldiers were trained in the tasks of military government. Compare that with the chaotically devised schemes for Iraq that were cobbled together at the last minute amid squabbling between the Pentagon and the State Department. Or with the confused and confusing mandate handed to the hapless Jay Garner, the first administrator of postwar Iraq, to devise a comprehensive plan for its administration in a matter of weeks.

Nonetheless, plans, however thorough, are worthless if they cannot be implemented. For that, establishing law and order is a minimal and basic condition. There was plenty of looting and disorder when U.S. forces entered Germany. In fact, it was on a scale far greater than anticipated or now remembered, most of it due to the rage that millions of slave laborers who’d been deported to Germany from Nazi-occupied countries, chiefly Poland and the Soviet Union, vented on their captors upon liberation.

As in Baghdad five years ago, the disorder also engulfed cultural institutions. When U.S. forces entered Munich, Hitler’s spiritual home and the seat of Nazi Party headquarters, scores of works of art simply disappeared from museums and art galleries. For two or three days, the northern city of Bremen was “probably among the most debauched places on the face of God’s earth,” wrote one witness of the frantic looting that took place after Allied soldiers entered its bomb-shattered streets. …

… Two years after Allied victory, Germany was in desperate straits, facing an economic crisis that threatened to nip democracy in the bud. Only the Marshall Plan, with its massive program of financial aid, saved the country from disaster. Self-government did not come until 1949, and Allied troops remained in West Germany as occupiers until 1955, a full decade after the defeat of the Third Reich. Unrepentant Nazis stayed active on the extreme fringes of West German politics for years, and a few ex-Nazis held high positions even in mainstream politics until the 1960s. The Christian Democratic politician Kurt Georg Kiesinger, who had joined the Nazi Party in 1933, was chancellor of the Federal Republic from 1966 to 1969.

Rebuilding a nation is possible. But even in the best of circumstances, it takes effort, time, patience and pragmatism. As 1945 confirms, liberation from a dictator in itself offers no easy path to peace or democracy. Battlefield victory is the easy bit. Building peace is a constant struggle — and it’s a matter of years, not weeks.

John Fund reminds us what’s a stake in the Colombia free-trade agreement.

… The simple truth is that the opposition to the trade agreement–from the Democratic presidential contenders to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi–has nothing to do with reality. Rep. Charles Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, admitted as much recently: “It’s not the substance on the ground–it’s the politics in the air.”

There was another period when raw politics was allowed to trump what many in Congress privately admitted was common sense. In the spring of 1930, as the economic downturn set off by the previous year’s stock market crash set in, Congress was debating the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill that sought to raise U.S. import barriers to record levels.

Most of the leading economists of the day opposed Smoot-Hawley. A front-page New York Times headline on May 5, 1930, read: “1,028 Economists Ask Hoover to Veto Pending Tariff Bill.” But for entirely selfish and shortsighted reasons, both Congress and President Hoover went along with the protectionist hysteria. As a result, the Great Depression was probably deepened and extended for years. …

George Will says John McCain is the only one talking like an adult about the housing sector.

Hurling a compliment at Barack Obama in the hope of wounding him, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has said that his proposals for responding to the economy’s housing-related credit woes put him “to the right of the Bush administration.” Her complaint is that the government spending and other market interventions that he proposes are a bit less flamboyant than hers.

Now, getting to the right of an administration that has increased federal spending twice as fast as did her husband’s administration is a snap, and a virtue. But it is John McCain’s policy minimalism — these things are relative — that merits compliments.

He says “it is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers.” For now, he is with Senate Republicans in opposing the Democrats’ proposal to empower judges to rewrite the terms of some mortgages, an idea that strikes at the sanctity of contracts and hence at the ethic of promise-keeping that is fundamental to social life. He opposes an additional dose of the toxin that has made the credit system sick — he favors strengthening rather than weakening down-payment requirements for loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration. And he has admirably avoided the rhetoric of victimology, …

London Times reporter with a good summary of the Clinton income news.

… Carl Bernstein, the Watergate journalist and author of A Woman in Charge, a biography of Hillary Clinton, said the tax returns provided an incomplete picture of the Clintons’ financial relationships.

“This is not transparency. That’s the difficulty with the Clintons all the time. There’s always less than transparency when these things occur under duress,” Bernstein said.

Clinton told a convention of Democrats in North Dakota when her tax forms were made public: “Don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely nothing against rich people. As a matter of fact my husband, much to my surprise and his, has made a lot of money since he left the White House by doing what he loves most – talking to people.”

Bill Clinton’s speaking fees and money from his 2004 autobiography, My Life, as well as the partnership earnings from Burkle’s Yucaipa Global Opportunities Fund, accounted for the largest portion of the Clintons’ joint income. Bill Clinton appears to have played the role of goodwill “door opener” for the billionaire financier, who has business ties with the government of Dubai and a media company in China.

“This is going to put Bill Clinton back in the forefront of the story in a big way,” said Bedell Smith. “He has already had a profoundly negative effect on the campaign with his volcanic eruptions and erratic behaviour.”

She believes that the couple’s wealth will remind voters of the ethical problems of the Clinton White House years. “They got into trouble because of suspect business dealings which were perhaps not illegal, but raised ethical questions about conflicts of interest,” she said. …

Christopher Hitchens looks askance at Obama and his “spiritual mentors.”

… Four decades after the murder in Memphis of a friend of the working man—a hero who was always being denounced by the FBI for his choice of secular and socialist friends and colleagues—the national civil rights pulpit is largely occupied by second-rate shakedown artists who hope to franchise “race talk” into a fat living for themselves. Far from preaching truth and brotherhood, they trade in cheap slander and paranoia and in venomous dislike of other minorities. Elijah Muhammad and the Black Muslims used to relish their meetings with Klansmen and Nazis to discuss the beauties of separatism. These riffraff, too, hang out with Farrakhan and make opportunist coalitions with the James Dobsons and Gary Bauers of the white right. This is the lovely clientele of the faith-based initiative. Who now cares to commemorate Philip Randolph or Bayard Rustin or the other giants of struggle and solidarity in whose debt we live? So amnesiac have we become, indeed, that we fall into paroxysms of adulation for a ward-heeling Chicago politician who does not complete, let alone “transcend,” the work of Dr. King; who hasn’t even caught up to where we were four decades ago; and who, by his chosen associations, negates and profanes the legacy that was left to all of us.

Stuart Taylor, who has effusively wrote of Obama in the past, has some second thoughts.

… Most important, perhaps, Obama’s assertion that “I can no more disown [Wright] than I can disown the black community,” together with his acknowledgment of “shocking ignorance” among many blacks, implies what other Wright apologists have said more directly: White-bashing, far-left rhetoric, and paranoid racial conspiracy theories are commonplace in many black churches and among many otherwise sensible black people.

Obama won’t disown these people, because that would be inconsistent with his lifelong quest to belong to the black community, movingly detailed in his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father. And because he needs their votes.

All of this is understandable. But would the same Obama who lacked the fortitude to break with Jeremiah Wright be a good bet, if elected, to take on his party’s own special interests? To break, when circumstances warrant, with the across-the-board liberal orthodoxy he has long embraced? Curb entitlement spending? Temper excessive affirmative-action preferences? Tame the lawsuit lobby? Assign the teachers unions their share of the blame for what Obama calls “crumbling schools that are stealing the future”?

Could he get tough, when necessary, with fashionably leftist foreign dictators, highly politicized international institutions, and sanctimonious European America-bashers? Or would he instead heed such soothing platitudes as his wife’s February 14 assertion that “instead of protecting ourselves against terrorists,” we should be “building diplomatic relationships”?

I have a hard time believing at this point that Obama is up to these tasks. I would love to see him prove my doubts wrong. And, of course, he does not have to be flawless to be the best candidate. He just has to show that his flaws are less crippling than the all-too-apparent shortcomings of Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain.

BBC reports Wikipedia gets good marks for accuracy.