Quote:
Originally Posted by Adder
We can’t kill our way to improving the world. See the last 20 years.
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Exactly. But this is controversial, it being counterintuitive to modeling and that shows that if you take over a country at gunpoint with thousands of soldiers and then install a puppet government to run it, all the while bulldozing the established social/political/commercial systems of the country which have been established over hundreds of years, the locals will greet you with open arms.
This also runs counter to the eminently researched white papers of men like Wolfowitz, Perle, and Kristol, who've seen "nation building" up close, feet on the ground. It runs smack in the face of their assessment, shared by the executive suite of Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Halliburton, that what really dogged us in Vietnam, Iraq, and now Afghanistan was a simple lack of will. That Horatio Alger ethos, and that belief in Manifest Destiny of democracy worldwide (the Bush Doctrine) simply eludes us. It is our lack of backbone, our fatigued spirit and amnesia for the Gipper's never-say-die attitude, that racks up the Ls instead of the Ws.
(Nevermind, of course, that the Gipper, like Bush II, used surgical strikes in response to the attack on Marines in Lebanon, and in response to Gaddafi, and never once considered "nation building" in either location, realizing it was hopeless.)
