Periodically I go searching blogs for “older/wiser” bloggers. The Ageless Project is one place I look. This time I found an interesting one (of course I think he’s wiser; I agree with his politics!).
Bill of Timepage links to this NY Times piece, which makes this important point:
… Recent experience does not suggest that the United States has developed a talent for bringing freedom and democracy to subject peoples. Reconstruction in Afghanistan still has a long way to go, and has run into familiar difficulties.
The same may be true of Iraq. Whatever the initial reception, it is inevitable that foreign rule will be resented, especially a postcolonial world. Proclamations of democracy and freedom may satisfy the public at home but will be meaningless unless made to work in Iraq.
Bill of Timepage sums it up well:
…the impositioning of western style Democracy, free trade and freedom of thought (including politics, lifestyle and religion) onto a conquered (OK, liberated) people, are very, very complicated goals. The only way these ideas work is for multiple generations to have been raised with them and for almost everyone to be comfortable with them. This is because, taken together, they sometimes are very unintuitive, even inconsistent (not to mention probably fundamentally inconsistent with the cultural beliefs that they are replacing). Some say we haven’t yet fully worked out the implications of these concepts ourselves. I think our experience in Afghanistan is telling. We have not changed the culture of those people and it doesn’t look like it will be happening for a long time, if at all. I am not even sure I believe that we should. Even if we could convert them by pouring money in to solve all of their physical requirements there simply isn’t enough money to do the job. Now we will have to finance two nation buildings.
And my search for older/wiser bloggers continues.

A comment on this post of mine prompted me to search out this article, which reports:
Prime Minister John Howard says the United States should take a leadership role in Iraq for an interim period after the military conflict.
Foreign Minister Alexander Downer will fly to the US next week to discuss the post-war reconstruction of Iraq.
Mr Howard says Iraq should be run by the US immediately after the war.
Oh yeah. Let’s clone today’s America. Spread the dis-ease.
When my Dad was young and more Republican (he got more liberal as he got older), I used to tell him that, when the revolution came, he knows what side I’m going to be on. Maybe that revolution will come yet.

Knee-jerk flag-waving, especially when combined with a disdain or outright hatred for dissent isn’t patriotism, it’s nationalism. And it’s dangerous.
Why aren’t more patriotic pacifists arguing this distinction?