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The British tried to impose culture and democracy (of a sort) on people all over the world for generations, and it ended with my grandparents generation giving it all back to the locals, many of whom did things that seemed (and continue to seem) barbaric.
But they did it to themselves.
The country that invented "Live Free or Die" and "No Taxation Without Representation" seems an unlikely champion of the imposition of order on another country.
The problem is that the US appears to think that Iraq is the same as post-Nazi Germany, or post-Imperial Japan.
In both of these historic cases, the US forces were viewed on average as a stabalising influence in the reconstruction of a normal society after the destuction of an ultimately unsuccessful tyrant.
The key thing seems to be that the people WANTED the help that the Americans could give them (Marshal plans and so on).
Just look at the post war constitutions of Japan and Germany - neither are allowed to send troops abroad with the freedom that the US has (or the UK).
Think about that for a moment. The US wrote (or helped to write) the constitutions of Germany and Japan after the war, and placed heavy limits on where and how they could send their troops overseas.
If the US had to live by the rules that they gave to the Germans, they would not be allowed to have gone to Iraq in the first place.
Do as I say, not as I do, anyone?
The investigations carried out after the invasion seem to have shown that Iraq was not capable of being much of a threatto anyone beyond the local area, and there has been little published (that I've seen, anyway) that gives clear links to the finding of terrorism.
Overall, we (the Westrn countries with troops there) should leave as fast as we can, and let them go to hell if they want to, but welcome them into the world's family of nations if we can, and when they're ready.
War is endemic to the human condition, and most nations have been forged by one form of war or another ever since the idea of nationhod was invented.
The powerful cannot stop war - the Romans, the Greeks, The British, The Germans, The Americans and every oher imperial or crypto-imperial power has found that out the hard way.
In the end in India, the British empire was defeated by an old man in a dhotti, and the same will happen for the American empire in Arabia.
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Overhead, the Albatross hangs motionless upon the air,
And deep beneath the rolling waves,
In labyrinths of Coral Caves,
The Echo of a distant time
Comes willowing across the sand;
And everthing is Green and Submarine
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