re: "You're Still a Superpower"

quote:

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Maybe? But if there's one lesson from post-Saddam Iraq, it's that force is a necessary evil in the world. Hussein was a brutal dictator. Now we know why... their culture seems do worse in power vacuums.

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How long did it take the French to get a stable, democratic government after Louis XVI was deposed?

Civil wars happen. So do revolutions. It's not our white man's burden to step in because "thur doin it rong." Especially when we have been gone from Iraq for all of three whole years. If it takes them generations, that will make them no different from any number of "civilized" European nations. What good does it do us to step in and try to force it? We already tried this. It failed. Saying "we should step in longer" is unsatisfactory too because we are not an empire where the will of the people (which is manifestly not an eternal occupation of Iraq) can be ignored in favor of whatever will expand the Pax Americana.

And spare me the "well, but we broke it we bought it." Firstly, I have yet to meet a person who believes this only about Iraq. The sorts of people who think we have business in Iraq also think we have business in Syria and Egypt and God knows where else. Secondly, it is a recipe for us being there forever because the borders of Iraq are drawn as a colony (the former British Mandate of Mesopotamia). They are not governable by a democracy, only by a strongman or a colonial power willing to constantly suppress ethnic tensions through the use of, let's say, "gasses which cause great inconvenience and spread a lively terror."