We won the war in Afghanistan but achieving the peace that we helped break during the 1980's appears to be beyond us. We won in the former Yugoslav Republic but keeping the peace there remains a day to day effort by UN forces backed by our military might. We won in Iraq, easily and with great dispatch, but the peace there remains elusive and erratic at best. Why can we not achieve the peace we are seeking abroad? Because we are too fond of our military might to understand its limits? Because the lies we tell our own people are too transparent to fool an Iraqi or Afghani citizen? Or is it simply because we are unlikely to create peace by using our military forces to solve the problems that often exist in other nations?

What are we doing in Iraq? There are real doubts raised in many of the better minds around the world that contemplate such matters seriously, that we are trying to establish a democracy there. Any truly democratic government in Iraq would be likely to fall out of bed with our leadership as soon as it achieved power. It would likely need to do that in order to maintain credibility with the Iraqi voters. In Afghanistan the opposition always carries guns and is seldom afraid to use them. The culture of male Afghanis is wrapped around the warrior ethic and their masculine pride virtually requires the oppression of women and children. That will become the basis for a democratic society when every tribal group in Afghanistan is destroyed along with their cultural biases and oppressive behaviors. We are unlikely to accomplish that even if it becomes our real agenda in the Afghani mess that we have been dabbling in for the last two decades.

In the Yugoslav sector of the world the hatreds run deep and have lasted for centuries. In none of these places does peace reign naturally. Nor do any of them have an actual bias toward democratic rule of their less favored neighbors. Are we really so deluded that we are trying to establish Democracy where the urge to kill your neighbor is all too often freely given sway over the rule of law? Are we using our military might in a vain effort to establish peace where peace does not naturally occur? Or are we perhaps using military power to devise a world in which our nation can utilize any level of resources needed to maintain our wasteful economic and social system? Perhaps the answer is yes to all three of those questions. A mixed set of motivations seems most likely in the case of a badly focused national agenda such as the one we are acting out in the world today.

It is easy to blame George W Bush for our failings as a nation but it is not his fault alone that we have become an oppressor of other nations and their peoples. The course of our history is as bloody and devious as that of any imperial power ever formed even though we hold dear the trappings of Democracy. Survival in a world of conflict, like the one that we entered with the first steps of Europeans on the North American Continent, often depends on the application of force to those who oppose your designs.

Our use of force to expand our borders in one way or another goes back a long ways in the history of our nation. It goes back far beyond our embracing the documents of Constitutional Law and a Universal Right to elect our own government. Our use of companies formed in the USA to rebuild Iraq is only another example of the many ways we can loot the conquered nations on our list of economic, social and military conquests. The US taxpayer is also being looted today, by the very companies that they pay with money and blood to support abroad. It is true that we will pay for the oil that lies under Iraq but the companies that profit most from that oil will be US companies, not French or Russian or German companies. It is true that we will pay for the pipeline that will run through Afghanistan before this series of wars is over, but the profits will accrue to the companies that sell the oil in our market and in Europe, not to the Afghani people. Thus go the wars of Imperial America as went the wars of every empire before it became dominant. God bless and keep you safe in the world we are creating with our insatiable thirst for oil and other goods. It will take the power of God to do that if we keep on the course we are on today.