" It is sad but true that a strong (inhumane) ruler like Saddam Hussein or Jozip Broz (Marshall Tito) of the former Yugoslavia is all that holds such tribalists in a nation. "

Let's hear it; three cheers for multiculturalism!

If I were President, then the USA would still be the military ruler of Iraq,and there would be no targeting of Americans.

But you guys keep voting for nice guys who tell you what you think you want to hear.

Harry Turtledove's "The Last Article" outlines the methods we should have used in Iraq, Afghanistan and the entire middle east.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_A...

The wikipedia entry is distorted by typical modern blind political correctness, but it gets the essential facts correct. (Except, Model didn't perpetrate the Qtub road massacre; Ghandi did.)

Part of what it misses is Model's motivation, as a professional soldier...

When Ghandi leads the Qtub road march, and the Wehrmacht soldiers fail to stop it, Field Marshall Model goes to Qtub road. While arguing with Ghandi, he drops his handkerchief part way to the waiting soldiers and their machine guns. He tells Ghandi that if any of his people pass that point, he washes his hands of them. Ghandi snidely asserts that he is quoting Pilate:

"Pilate washed his hands to evade responsibility," the field marshall answered steadily; he was in control of himself again. "I accept it; I am responsible to my Fuhrer and to Oberkommando-Wehrmacht for maintaining Reich control over India, and I will do what I see fit to carry out that obligation."

What happens after the massacre... Model chastises the soldiers who failed to break up the march, and laid the blame for the death and suffering at their feet; had they done their job, they would have broken up the march and nobody would have had to have been shot. He then requires them to put the wounded out of their misery as penance.

Another important point; Ghandi and Nehru listen to the radio in hiding to hear the expected repudiation of Model by the German government. Imagine their dismay when they hear the government not only commend Model, but warned that responses to any more such disobedience will be worse.

When Gandhi calls a general strike, Model determines that the railroads are most needed back in operation, so he sends squads to every twentieth house of the railway workers, pulled them out and had them shot. Pretty soon, they began returning to work.

Part of the last conversation between Model and Ghandi:

Model refused to be baited. "We do what is right for our volk, for our Reich. We are meant to rule, and rule we do - as you see."

While I know many, if not most of you feel the United States should put its figurative balls on the shelf and huddle on the east coast of this continent, pretending to be "equal" to everyone else out there, some of us are not willing to see history repeat in the streets of our home towns.
We needed to go into the middle east and clean house long ago. Agreed, Iraq is a convenient political fiction; it should have been made a British protectorate at its creation; a colony whose existence was for the benefit of the British, not the Arab Moslems. Instead, the British played politics with their collective consciences, which is always a recipe for disaster.

"The true preventative is a culture of reality and reason. You do not get that with a military victory."

Speak for yourself. *I* do. The Romans did, before they became multicultural. The British did, before they became multicultural. The present Japan is a creation of our military victory.

Objectivism, like most ideologies, only works within the context of a given culture and society. Out there in the real world, one might presume to force lions to lay down with lambs and live in harmony.

Cheney shouldn't have had to say shit about WMDs. If the left weren't full of such influential cowards, the fact that he fired on our warplanes and violated the armistice was enough; but no, the cowards and moral equivocators and downright traitors didn't care about what had to be done until they thought maybe someone might say the word "nuke" three times and beetlejuice might appear.

Please explain to me exactly what security for the people rebuilding Iraq *should* cost; while you're at it, please provide a cost-analysis of rebuilding a country's infrastructure that has been allowed to go to pot for years before the invasion.

This isn't about blood-for-oil. This is about crushing our enemies.