jamnww said:
Which would you prefer the decade of the Revolutionary War or the decade afterward before the Constitution...
Perhaps you would like to review the practice of the British Navy of taking US Naval personnel hostage to serve in their forces or the dominance of the British Navy in Naval warefare. Then again maybe you prefer to consider the dominance of our Southern border by what was at the time a well developed and professional army in Mexico?
If the US had been in Europe at any point before the Civil War things would have been ugly, the oceans gave us time to develope as a nation, maybe Iraq needs something to "keep the wolves at bay"? If you recall there was a large Native American population on the Western border throughout US history...and if you recall that then maybe you will recall the number of attacks from this insurgency? (Yes, I am completely aware that the US was wrongly stealing land from them at the time, and in no way condone that but the struggle I think has some level of comparison.)
It all comes down though to the fact that you have to craw before you can walk, to use a common phrase...
False analogy, false analogy, false analogy, and um, false analogy...
The biggest difference among many that makes these analogies false is that the revolution was accomplished by Americans creating their own future. The constitution was written by Americans, any of whom could have walked away at any time. What in the world do the British Navy and/or Mexican Army have to do with anything? What army is massed on Iraq's borders? External threats usually have a unifying effect, and yet I'm not seeing much unifying, unless its the Kurds and Shiites unifying against the Sunnis...Sorry, your post doesn't make sense. In all of American history (for the sake of argument, we'll say 1776 onward), Americans have made decisions for themselves and then borne the consequences of those decisions. Iraq has not. Ever. After it's so-called independence it was a puppet of British oil interests and later, American anti-Iranian interests.
This crawling before walking thing is another interesting Bushism that appeals to our sense of order but is just plain not true in the case of modern states. Can you name me any state that formed and built infrastructure, provided services, began extending rights to its citizens, etc., without first providing for its own security, both external and internal? Even in the United States, all else is subject to security concerns. If you mean that their security forces need to crawl before they walk, I'm not sure how that would go either. This whole, "As they stand up, we'll stand down," thing again sounds nice, but doesn't hold water. How do we know when/if they're "standing up?" And once the U.S. leaves, for what are they going to stand up? You realize, the U.S. could be training and equipping the most lethal police force in the Middle East? These guys could support the next dictator for decades. Wonderful.
Finally, if indeed building a successful state does take decades (implying that we'll be providing the Iraqis a well-armed incubator for at least, say, one decade), why wasn't the American public informed of this in early 2003? Or did that just slip some speechwriter's mind?
I feel like this is a threadjack...This thread is for people to feel good about everything we think we've accomplished while ignoring the true precariousness of our situation in Iraq and the Middle East.
I keed, I keed....
