Along for the ride

Is it just me or is the US looking more like it is just along for the wild ride in Iraq? Our Ambassador, when lecturing the Iraqi's about the dangers of sectarian violence, sounds a bit odd since it was our intervention that has caused this mess to begin with. If he wants to lecture somebody about the dangers of stirring up sectarian violence he should start with the gang in the White House.
When I was a kid we took a trip to the beach and my brother and I were playing around in the sand when we noticed a bit of seaweed sticking up out of the sand. There was a tiny trickle of water aroundt the little weed. I pulled on the seaweed. Within a few minutes there was a gorge 5 feet deep with a torrent of rushing water. I had unwittingly openned the floodgate to a stuffed drain. There are so many life lessons that one can learn from childhood and then apply to your adult life. Such as when you see an iregularity in the sand, you might do well to leave it alone. When hiking in the the high desert of Oregon you would be stupid to stick your arm under every rock since you would probably get bitten by a rattle snake. Or if you are climbing Mount Everest you would be seen a fool to go up in only your long underwear and bunny slippers.
We went into Iraq with, depending on your point of view, with good intentions. However the road to hell is paved with many of those. It is a mark of how obtuse we rich fat people are that we thought we could make a happy land out of a dictatorship. General George Marshal would have really cautioned against getting our hopes up with Iraq. History is filled with failed attempts at nation building, the vast majority of such attempts colapse. Assemblies of millions of people are just too complex to make such affairs work out. The only reason it worked out with Germany and Japan was that both naitons had the gun of Soviet Russia pointed at their heads. They simply had no good alternative to us. Iraq has no such gun. On the contrary the population is given pause to trust us, and given reasons to believe in those who fight against us. Suni and Shiite have lots of reason to kill each other. Regligion is always a good reason to butcher your fellow humans. The land of Europe is filled with the bones of Catholics, Cathars, Franciscans, Calvinists, Lutherans, Baptists, and a whole host of other sects that cut each other to peices over religious differences. Us going into Iraq and trying to make a democracy is like us going into a time machine and trying to hammer out a democracy out of the insane Holy Roman Empire of the 15th century.