Inexplicably, I'm going to argue for the wrong side, but I'll let somebody else untangle things ... If the repartions demanded by the Allies at the end of WWI hadn't been so swingeing, Hitler would have had a much harder job to get to the top. The German economy was in a very bad way by 1933, with inflation running away (and made much play of by the propagandists). Now, I heard it said a year or so after the last Gulf War that we were a little too magnanimous in our victory; if we'd been a little tougher and continued the war for just a few more days, we could have made all the Iraqi soldiers walk home -- literally -- and scored a big propaganda victory over Saddam: he would have been perceived by his people as a failed leader, who started a war he couldn't finish, and he'd have been turfed out.

So the second World War was a consequence of a too hard attitude to the defeated country, while the second Gulf War is the consequence of a too soft attitiude...?

Steve