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I can't agree. Iraq is very much still at war, with the surgents backed by Syria, Iran, and bolstered by Saudi, Syrian, Pakistani, and Palestinian fighters. It isn't reconstruction. Indeed, the ongoing "security problem", which is really a terrorist war, is preventing the kind of reconstruction the United States and Great Britain, with very good intentions, would like to do.

The American left likes to call Iraq a quagmire. Unless, as the author suggests, the U.S. is willing to fight to win, it will be just that and the end result will be no better than in Vietnam. The U.S. can certainly win the war in Iraq if it has the will to do so.

There are times it is better to be feared than to be popular.

I beg to differ, sir. Iraq like Reconstruction?

In the American South, unlike Iraq, there was already a history of free, consensual government. What the War of Northern Aggression was ultimately fought for (despite the propaganda about slavery)was the continuation of that ideal. Should a people,and by extension, a state, that finds itself no longer part of a happy federation have the right to leave it? The answer, truthfully, was YES. This was discussed at length at the Hartford Convention, and resulted in the "All powers not specifically assigned to the Federal Government, etc, etc" language in the Constitution.

Southerners fought for their freedom against a tyrannical regime (as they saw it) the same way New Englanders had 90 years before. The basis for both conflicts was the idea that the governed had a say in how they were governed.

Reconstruction had nothing to do with reestablishing this long tradition of self-determination; it was a policy aimed at reabsorbing the south into the Union up until the point that any talk of leaving it again was laughable, while leaving the idea of self-determination intact.It was the Victor lording it over the Vanquished and leaving his stamp upon a conquered people.

Iraq is nothing of the sort. Iraqis have no history of self-determination. They have nothing resembling Western-style democratic processes. They are tethered, physically and morally, to a system that has raised the strongman and the mullah to respected, unassailable, positions. We are not reabsorbing our own here, we are laying the foundations for "the other" to become "us". It's a totally different operation.

And the unfortunate part of it all is that the author is correct: we cannot instruct them on how to become "us" until we beat the snot out of them and show them the error of their ways. This is not a political or economic war, sir, it is a war of civilizations --- their worldview versus our worldview. Unlike Southerners though, the Islamonazis have not set out with the idea of having separate states based mutual respect and common ideals (as many secessionists did), they just want the rest of us dead. Even the most die-hard secessionist never wanted every Yankee dead.