World War I: Still Ending

[Guest Warwick Green]

By George Will

NEWSWEEK

...The insurgency in Iraq began as U.S. forces arrived. In "Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq," Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor report that Marine Lt. Therral (Shane) Childers of Mississippi seems to have been the first U.S. combat fatality:

"A tan Toyota pickup truck began to approach Childers' platoon. The Marines were not sure how to respond. They had been primed to take on Iraqi T-72s, T-55s, and Soviet-designed armored personnel carriers called BMPs—not a lone civilian vehicle. The truck picked up speed until it was bouncing across the desert at seventy miles per hour. As it flew by the platoon, civilian-clad Iraqis in the cab and bed of the truck raised AK-47s and sprayed the Marines with automatic weapons fire."....

Today we are involved in nurturing Iraq's civil society. One assumption is that elections are, more often than not, and in the long run, inherently conducive to civility. But to get to the long run we must pass through the present. And in a book coming next month, "The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End," Peter W. Galbraith, who has worked for the government of Iraq's almost-autonomous Kurdish region, notes that two elections that have taken place in the Middle East since the U.S. invasion of Iraq have not been helpful. Iranian voters replaced a modern, reformist president with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who denies that the Holocaust occurred and vows to complete it. And Palestinian parliamentary elections were won by the radical Islamic terrorist organization Hamas.

Yugoslavia and Iraq were created at the same time, in the aftermath of World War I, and for the same reason—to cope with that war's destruction of empires. Yugoslavia was assembled from shards of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Iraq was carved from the old Ottoman Empire. Both were artifacts held together always largely, and often only, by force.

As the sad and often bloody story of Yugoslavia comes to a close, the question of whether Iraq has a future as a single entity, let alone as a democratic one, remains open. But last week the chances became a little bit better because a sociopath has died, and other sociopaths have been given reason to wonder whether taking his place would be a prudent career move.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13249138/site/newsweek/

[August1991]

Americans are so often juvenile in their approach to life that one must admire them. In any case, their naivety leads them to do the right thing.

[Rue]

Americans are so often juvenile in their approach to life that one must admire them. In any case, their naivety leads them to do the right thing.

I would say "do the right thing, sometimes".

This Iraq mess I would say they are doing the wrong thing. However when it comes to fighting terrorists I would say they are doing the right thing. I just disagree with them trying to turn Iraq into a proxy state. I think that is a far different agenda then in tracking down and killing terrorists and they like to confuse the two issues and use the pretense of fighting terrorism to justify their failed attempts at trying to turn Iraq into a colony. The Turks couldn't do it. The British couldn't do it. Even the Mongols couldn't do it.