What is a war without meaningless dancing in the streets and looting? That is was greeted me on the television at 3.30 am today (my illness kept me awake.) Every news network carried the same footage of Iraqi men "celebrating" the demise of the Hussein regime. Most networks analyzed the footage as legitimate joy over the end of the regime. However, they failed to go any deeper than that.

World War I ended in much the same way as this war. In fact, the US would have preferred that the Iraqis revolted against their leadership more in the way that the Germans did. In November 1919 the sailors in Kehl started the revolution, spreading it throughout the entire country within one week. The Kaiser was forced to flee; the ruling social democrats proclaimed a democratic republic. The allied armies had barely crossed into Germany when the empire collapsed.

Is there a lesson to be learned by comparing the fall of the two regimes? Germans felt that they could protect themselves from harsh treatment under the allied occupation and peace treaty by distancing themselves from the empire: if the war was Germany's fault, wasn't it the old Germany of Bismarck and Wilhelm II and not the one of parliamentary democracy? In truth, the Germans regretted losing. They showed as much as they protested the loss of the army, the navy, and the implementation or reparations payments.

One question that had not been adequately answered by the media is how complicit Iraqis were with the Hussein regime. While I was watching, a reported described how Iraqis lived in fear of being denounced. What was left unsaid, and perhaps implied, was that Iraqis denounced each other.