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Certainly the planning for the governance and occupation of Iraq was woefully inadequate and based on some astonishingly inappropriate assumptions... but comparisons to Germany and Japan are unlikely...

When did this become "fact"?

I'm not sure it's possible to have a "global insurgency" without stretching the definition of insurgency beyond the breaking point, nor am I convinced that there is a...

I didn't miss OIF, just referred to it as "Iraq", which I thought sufficiently obvious. I didn't claim that US intervention had ceased, only that it has been scaled back from its Cold War peak.

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I'd submit the opposite: without the overriding, if often irrational, justification of the commie menace our behaviour has become a great deal less outrageous and a great deal more restrained than it...

This is certainly true, as we learned (one hopes) in the cold war. It's worth noting, though, that our current engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan do not really fall into this category. In neither...

Having this same discussion on another thread, I guess that's not too unusual.

It may be obvious that the HN government must be out front, but it seems equally obvious to me that if the HN...

Again, though, where is the host nation government in this process? Is it just US Military, USAID, US Agencies involved?

If the key problem is, say, the lack of a road or a bridge or an...

As complex as this diagram is, it seems to leave out some key problems. Most prominently, I don't see any recognition of the presence of the host nation government, national and local, and where it...

True enough, but the assumption of "a government" and "a populace" does not always hold together. Populaces are rarely uniform; they may in some cases be bitterly divided - particularly in countries...