POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL
This is not a matter of liberal or conservative.
It is a matter of realism versus ideology, with the Bush mob representing ideology.
This mission is pointless. You cannot remake the institutions and customs of a nation of about 25 million in a few years.
As I've said before, Canada tried this with its aboriginal people decades ago with residential schools. An utter failure.
Some of the Americans making comments here only confirm the widely-accepted view that Americans are ideologues who don't think.
Americans have failed in Iraq and you failed in Afghanistan, just as they failed in Vietnam and Somalia and a number of other places.
You can't bomb people into democracy or into modernity, but you sure can kill lots of innocent people.
America's only clear-cut victory goes back to WWII and that required sinking to complete barbarism, using the atomic bomb on civilians.
The basic problem is that ideologue Americans seek the wrong victories.
They are always fighting imagined devils, whether communists or Muslims, instead of dealing in practical terms with the world. And the truth is they don't really want to fight if it means they suffer real losses. So they bomb. This is a formula for guaranteed failure.
Dropping dollar bills instead of bombs would have been a more sensible policy.
Just dumb.
