Wishing does not make it so. Japan had no viable competing ideology. Shintoism is entirely different than Islam and Japan’s Bushido culture was mainly limited to the military. In addition, Japan has a ‘submit to greater power’ culture.

Essentially permanent deployment of 100,000 — 150,000 US troops would in time amount to America propping up the favored regime. It would have meant prohibiting religious partys because any Islamic party that came to power would quickly end democracy. That had we stayed in Iraq things would have been different is not in dispute.

Re: “Was Operation Iraqi Freedom a strategic blunder or a strategic victory?”

I perused your link and can’t agree. Iraq, even had Obama ‘stayed the course’ and backed Bush’s “Freedom Agenda” never would have been another South Korea, Japan or Germany.

So too with Afghanistan.

A secular democracy cannot be implanted into a non-supportive environment, such that it becomes self-sustaining. Not when that environment consists of a hostile cultural and religious make-up.

As long as Muslims embrace Islam, they embrace an ideology fundamentally inimical to secular democracies. Someone cannot in principle, embrace Allah’s edicts, while simultaneously supporting the “unalienable right” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

A woman cannot be pregnant but not pregnant.

The entire Bush strategy in “winning hearts and minds” for the support of a secular democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan was predicated upon the premise that, all human beings possess a universal aspiration for self-determination which supersedes cultural and religious imperatives. Both Iraq and Afghanistan have disproved that thesis.

That is the non-legal reason why invading Iraq was ultimately doomed to failure. Islam ensures that Muslim societies will either be a theocracy or a dictatorship.

Answer to “Did Iraq failing its compliance test justify the regime change?”.

On foreign affairs, the Paul faction is arm in arm with the Left with virtually indistinguishable form albeit offset rationale.

Neo’s post on the Goldberg article goes to the forward relevance of setting the record straight on OIF at the premise level of the political discourse.

The Iraq intervention is not dusty history. The fundamental principles of American leadership of the free world manifested with the Iraq intervention so that stigmatizing the mission has discredited the paradigm. Yet the prevailing narrative of OIF is demonstrably false.

A plainly false narrative that is easily exposed by primary sources that are easily found on-line is yet somehow a course-setting, cornerstone premise in our political discourse and a linchpin operative element in our foreign policy – with big compounding consequences at home and abroad.

What’s past is prologue. Setting the record straight looking back is about correcting orientation to lay a proper course ahead.

Recommendation: How to talk about your Iraq vote (advice to Hillary Clinton).

Agreed, though I hardly expect ‘them’ to leave us alone after we’d invited them into the country. By opening one Pandora’s box we’ve opened them all. Now we find we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. I, and I expect those who would be shot and/or blown to smithereens, would rather we don’t – and looked first to our own country and people. Prudence is not a vice.

Once “ain’t” was validated by inclusion in the dictionary, the decline became unstoppable.

JurassiCon Rex,

Sooner or later, the dominoes in that region were doomed to collapse. Islam’s Imams and Mullahs sense that their 7th century ideology cannot withstand another century of cultural intrusion from the modern world. That is the source of their aggression, along with of course Islam’s theological imperatives to achieve world domination.

The erroneous neocon foundational premise that a universal desire for self-autonomy superseded cultural and religious imperatives doomed their effort in the M.E.

Imagining that the option ever existed to just leave the area to itself and that, then they will leave us alone is an equally flawed premise.

Islam is a cancer, sooner or later either it will have to be cut out and banished into a permanent quarantine or the Three Conjectures will manifest.

You are aware the Japanese attacked us, yes? That Germany declared war on us, yes? That Korea was a draw and present day North Korea exists because South Korea had no incentive to look to their own defense but depended on and still depends on the US to stand up to an axis of evil. Sixty-five years and counting. Humans don’t let their flesh and blood children sponge that long.