You know this actually DOES have the potential to be an interesting topic.
But we have to keep in mind that, at that time, the success of the occupation was NOT a genuine certainty. We can look back from the future and say "This succeeded, therefore Iraq will succeed as well - it is preordained because of these similarities between the two."
If you wanted to be really true to this WWII success analogy though, you'd have to say "Iraq is rebuilt and then a few years later a wall is built in Baghdad with America and (eg) Iran on either side for the next 40 years.
There are other similarities too. One that struck me was from this 1945 meeting between Allen Dulles of the OSS and the Council on Foreign Relations:
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/200311...f-germany.html
Quote:
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As soon as you attempt to get Germany to tick and to make arrangements for a government, the lack of men becomes apparent at once. Most men of the caliber required suffer a political taint. When we discover someone whose ability and politics are alike acceptable, we usually find as we did in one case that the man has been living abroad for the past ten years and is hopelessly out of touch with the local situation. We have already found out that you can't run railroads without taking in some Party members.
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(the rest of the article is a good read btw, but a bit long. Let me know if it should be posted.)
Now in our "history lesson mode", you could take this as an indictment of the relationship between the Bush Administration and Ahmed Chalabi and the US decision to not involve the now dangerously idle Iraqi Army in reconstruction efforts.
And of course the biggest problem with making comparisons is the fact that the German occupation was, by its very nature, a multinational effort with the country divided into zones. We could easily ask, would reconstruction have succeeded if only one country had been doing the job?