Capture, Detain and COIN: merged thread

[Bob's World]

Some days I think we have grown up and become our parents. I would hate to think that that is as inevitable for nation as it is for a man.

[wm]

Some days I think we have grown up and become our parents. I would hate to think that that is as inevitable for nation as it is for a man.

Nations, as was pointed out long ago by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, are artificial persons, just as corporations are. We can and do make judgments about them just as we do about our neighbors and the folks we see on the nightly news or American Idol. Maybe we rush to judgment in doing so, but that, I suispect, is part of who and what we are as finitely rational beings who are also creatures of need.