>By that logic, the United States government, or any other government
>with a powerful military for that matter, can destroy any functional
>state, create a mess, become a belligerent occupier, and continue
>the occupation on the pretext that now there is no functional state
>because it destroyed it.
The question was how to extricate Iraq from the mess it's in now, and minimize the suffering of Iraqis, something you don't seem to address much other than to say it's the business of Iraqis, who don't have any institutions or resources to accomplish the task. I also said this should not be the U.S.'s role, so this point is doubly irrelevant.
>In any case, no one but Iraqis themselves is capable of unifying the
>nation of Iraq and building a new state that enjoys legitimacy in
>the eyes of the majority of the Iraqi people. The process of
>nation-building and state-building will not be pretty -- the United
>States itself, before creating a functioning republican government
>not controlled by slave-owners, had to fight two bloody wars: the
>American Revolution and the Civil War, the wars held up by many
>Americans as shining examples of noble struggles for liberty, rather
>than as arguments in favor of the British Empire's hold on North
>America.
What does this have to do with getting the electricity running?
Doug