Monday, April 12, 2004

Because We Can

I've posted about this before, thought not recently, but Kos has a post about the loss of the aura of American invincibility. Part of the 763 ever-changing reasons to invade Iraq was to prove we could. I assume that the people who made this decision were well aware that we could easily topple just about any government on the planet, so when we say "to prove we could" we're talking about something a bit more complicated than that. What we mean is that we could do it cheaply, roughly within the bounds of international consensus of appropriate use of force and the amount of collateral damage, and that what was left in its place would be better and more Democratic than what we took out.

Well, thanks a lot - in both Afghanistan and Iraq they've managed to prove that all of those things actually aren't true. We can still destroy the world with a few well-placed nukes, but we can't just cut off and replace the head anywhere we want.