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Democracy imposed by force? And if force does not work, more force?
Then the other day we were told that now our leader is thinking we should stay there for a long, long time, "like Korea." We kept troops in South Korea to keep an eye on North Korea--and yet, under our very eyes, one of the poorest nations in the world, a gruesome dictatorship, managed to make atom bombs and tested missiles. Ahem.
Who or what do we plan to keep an eye on from Iraq?
Iran of course -- and oll.
That explains why we have been building an enormous embassy--a self-sufficient city--and why we built a number of "permanent bases" in Iraq. That then must have been in the plan from the beginning, and the WMD, the connection with Al-Qaeda, democracy in the Middle East, oh and another hundred-year war against terror, were just a facade?
Of course oil was never mentioned as a reason for regime change in Iraq.
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Our world has become strange and almost alien to me. While I was busy doing other things, living a life, having a career, "they" changed the world when I was not looking. Globalization sounded good, but we were not prepared for outsourcing, or electronic menus to replace people jobs, or a flood of new gadgets we were supposed to buy on an income that bought increasingly less. While we were mesmerized by the bigger and higher definition television screens entertaining us 24 hours a day, wars were fought, people died, two million people fled Iraq, the climate of the world is changing. Our world is no longer the world I knew. This country is harsher, coarser, maybe dumber, than during some other years I recall.
Now that I think of it, we always meddled in other countries' affairs, but it was done in the background, not with shock and awe. Dropping our mighty might in the middle of the Middle East, which everyone knew was a cauldron of problems anyway, we seem to have stirred up more violent terrorism than ever before?
Not in my name, certainly. But then, of course I was not asked, and the people who I chose to represent me in Congress were swept along in the fear we were told we must all fear.
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We need to ask more questions.
We need to ask the big questions behind the what-to-do questions. How or when we get out of Iraq is obviously important, but in order to be able to talk about that, we need to know why we should be there in the first place.
We need to know what the Constitution says about a unitary presidency (particularly in a war that is waged for slippery, changing reasons, getting vaguer, grander, more questionable..).
Why should we have a war on drugs when its utility is questionable. And, closely related, is it really necessary to be that "tough on crime?" It is not shameful to study what other societies are doing (or not doing). In fact it is smart; we might learn from other people's experience. Isn't that how humans have distinguished themselves from the rest of creation for thousands of years? We learn from others, or even from our own yesterday's mistakes. (For instance, we could have learned from our own fairly recent history that big enormous armies cannot win against guerrillas, resisters, insurgents, terrorists.)
