Iraq was the frontier of both the Roman and the British empires. The turbulent history of Iraq under the British protectorate and afterwards suggests how difficult it would be to rule the country. The Wall Street Journal once suggested that we could have a McArthur style regency over the country. I suspect the reality may be more like Haiti or Nicaragua, a country that we are continually compelled to intervene in to settle its affairs "once and for all." An important difference, though, is that overall Latin American resentment of the norteamericanos is much less than Muslim anger at the West. Thus we could have a low-level war with terrorist acts and military flair ups for a very long time. The current enthusiasm for empire forgets about the violent, on-going resistance to it.