Quote:
Originally posted by ironweed
Simply not our kind, these foreign chaps. It's most damnably difficult even making oneself understood.
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translation:
Perhaps we could not have avoided it -- perhaps it was inevitable that we should come to be fighting the natives of those lands -- but I cannot understand it, and have never been able to get at the bottom of the origin of our antagonism to the natives. I thought we should act as their protector -- not try to get them under our heel. We were to relieve them from Sadaam's tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own, and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Iraquis, a government according to Iraqui ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. But now -- why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater. I'm sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation.
