Dave, I threw out a few possibilities that could help to explain why we received a different welcome in post war Japan and Germany on the one hand, and Iraq on the other. You very emphatically rebutted those possible explanations.
You may be right. If you are right and if my possible reasons don't hold up, then how do you explain why we're having to keep over a hundred thousand soldiers in Iraq and yet we're unable to keep order, rebuild the infrastructure and take control of even the few miles of highway between Baghdad and the airport? Why are our soldiers are being hunted and targeted by deadly insurgents? Why is the Iraqi population refusing to give us what our military euphemistically calls "good intelligence?" Why does there seem to be an inordinate amount of dancing in the streets around the bodies of dead American soldiers?
Because surely some critical aspect of the Iraqi society is far different in post war Iraq than what we encountered in post war Japan and Germany, isn't it? And you can dismiss any reasons for why those differences exist but in the final analysis the only thing that matters is that IT IS DIFFERENT and that because of those differences we may be INCAPABLE of "finishing the job."
And we ought to know that since we're sending soldiers to die and kill in Iraq and we have a tremendous responsibility to make sure that we know what we're doing and that we're not wasting the lives of those we kill and of those loyal young men and women that wear our uniforms.
Regarding the rest of your post talking about ideologies that "despise" and "hate" western democracies, so what? the world's always been a dangerous place and we've always had the obligation of self defense. We've never before, however, claimed the right to destroy all threats that haven't acted against us. You seem to hate and despise communism, fascism and probably a few other isms. Do you think you have the right to forcibly change the views of those that subscribe to such isms, or maybe kill them into submission? Did we have to blow up the Soviet Block to protect ourselves from communism or did patience and time do the job for us? Before we invaded Iraq was an Ayatollah controlled Iran becoming a greater or lesser threat after 30+ years of being left alone?
In today's world of easily available, large impact, killing technology that can be accessed and utilized by small groups of nationless, faceless men, the real war is the war of ideas, not conventional military force. Any action we take that strengthens those ideas will create more danger, not less. Even if we could successfully invade and occupy every nation that contained a population of people who "hated" or "despised" western democracies, the world would be MORE dangerous, not less. Terrorism is, after all, the response of the weak to the strong. When we become the bully on the block, when entire populations perceive that we're taking what we want and the hell with them and when we create pictures of our men in uniform alongside the broken bodies of women and children, the ideas that support, create and fuel terrorism grow stronger. We should remember that. Ed |
