<<after 9/11, our priority must be with security>>
I agree. My criticism is that our goals seem to be far more ambitious than that, unattainably ambitious.
If security was the goal, then we would be satisfied with inspections in Iraq. Iraq has never supported terrorist organizations. Iran and Syria have worse track records for funding, training, and arming terrorists. Iraq is not a threat in conventional warfare; they have no tanks, planes, artillery. And, with inspections (which everyone but Bush is satisfied with), the WMD threat is gone.
Instead, the goal is "regime change" followed by "nation-building". This policy is indistinguishable from "colonization". We could get away with it in Germany and Japan, because they are Western (or Westernized) nations, with at least some partial history of democracy. The changes we made were not too different from things that had been done earlier in those countries. In Iraq (and Afghanistan), we have to start from scratch, and that job would take generations to accomplish.
re Alexander:
The history I read says that any fortified city that didn't surrender as soon as he arrived at their walls, could expect a slaughter (often every man, woman, and child), when Alexander took the town. He did this from Greece to Egypt to India, and everywhere in between. There is another story, memorable enough to survive for 2 1/2 millenia: one day Alexander was holding a party, for some of his friends, fellow Macedonians who had fought at his side for years. One of them, a boyhood friend, said something that angered Alexander, who then grabbed a sword and killed him. Of course, since he was an absolute monarch, he was never punished for this. Strip away the romantic idealization of Violence and Power, and what is left? He's a guy who travelled widely, and left piles of corpses everywhere he went. |
