Iraq war will haunt west - Emma Sky

[Dayuhan]

Guess I find it all a bit self righteous.

Post-mortem introspection often is, and I can forgive that.

The one thing myself and other keep coming to is: How to engage the actual people that are the focus of all of this.

What I keep coming to is the need to accept that engaging actual people becomes extraordinarily difficult when the engagement begins with you invading and conquering their country. It makes an already difficult process infinitely more difficult.

I don't doubt that poor planning for the aftermath of invasion was a major cause of the disarray and the generally unsatisfactory results. The danger in focusing on that, of course, ist that we might easily reach the conclusion that if we just plan a bit better, we could pull off regime change without a disorderly aftermath. I'm not convinced that we can do that, or that we should be trying.