Smurf said:
Yes, that's what I thought you would say. What, exactly, has changed that's made you decide no?
If I should point to a single thing, it is the shock I've felt that the US government evidently doesn't understand the most elementary facts about the political systems in the Middle-East (as exposed in the Iraq invasion).
It is an elementary fact that clans have still extremely strong positions in middle Eastern societies, and that the central government of a Middle Eastern country has just about nothing to do with the centralistic governments of the West (including US).
That is, in for example Iraq (and Saudi-Arabia) it is (or was) recognized that the big men locally would essentially appoint most officials, and "interpret" central edicts and give them a local flavour.
The small men locally will first and foremost try to ally themselves with a big man, rather than involve themselves with the "government".
Now, Saddam Hussein certainly did his best to gain overall control in the Iraqi society, but that would often be by playing rivalling big men against each other, rather than sending his own trusted folk into a region he was less familiar with, or didn't matter too much.
The big men on their hand would be involved in endless power games where they alternated between trying to curry favour from a bigger man (the biggest being..S.H.) or try to keep some private space where they themselves were dominant.
That is, S.H.'s dictatorship was never a centralistic dictatorship as that in, say, DDR.
Now, the Americans ought to have known from day 1 that if they were to create a STABLE society afterwards, the most efficient way to do so would have been to curry favour among the segment of big men throughout the country (many of whom are neither Baathists or Muslim fanatics) and get a sufficient number of them as backers.
What did they do instead?
They set up a centralistic, Western type of government in Baghdad and assumed that the local chiefs and sheiks wouldn't be mortally insulted at being deprived their hereditary rights of local government!
That is, to most Iraqi, the centralistic puppet government is felt as something totally alien, they've been used to a life lived out mostly on the local level (with a vague fear of big Daddy S.H. sitting in Baghdad possibly watching them).
In effect, therefore, US showed that they really can't conceive of any other type of a society than a US with a bad president.
And for that reason alone, the US regime cannot be regarded as a competent player in international politics any longer.
It would be the end of the US military supremacy in the world if they had a second debacle in Iran. Now, I think George is stupid, but not THAT stupid (and I'm sure that within the US administration, there's some failure protection here, which will have George shot or something if ever he turns out to be that silly), so it simply won't happen, and the Iranians know that.
China's mercy?... Yeah, if only those terrorists hadn't sunk all those aircraft carriers. 