No one would dare admit it at the time, it was simply too unpatriotic. Anyone who did make the comparison, publicly, would have been ridden out of town on a rail, so to speak. But things are so messed up now, and the whole Iraq invasion and occupation is now recognized to have been such a monumental blunder that it can be told for exactly what it was: a foreign army invading and occupying a sovereign nation after first destroying that nation’s infrastructure and leaving it unable to continue functioning as a nation. Unfortunately, while destroying their country, we left their army virtually intact. Although disbanded and unemployed they were fully armed with left over munitions that we failed to secure. In World War II, if the Maquis in France or partisans in the Balkans had access to such resources as we left laying around for the Iraqis, how many more Nazis could they have eliminated? In any case, our occupation of Iraq from the standpoint of the native people we had conquered is little different from Hitler’s occupation of Europe.