Modulator

Iraq Afterwards

Josh Marshall suggests in this article that it may not be quite as easy as some think to transform Iraq into a democratic pro western government:

a low death toll is key to convincing Iraqis and the rest of the Arab world that we are liberators, not conquerors or destroyers. In short, it’s key to making our invasion seem like a good thing.

But that’s the catch. Occupying armies will always keep things under control in the short-term. But the sort of transformation we engineered in the former Axis powers required a far greater pliancy, one which allowed us not only to disarm these countries but rewrite their textbooks, reorient their politics, and do much more.

Doing that in a foreign country may require a mauling of the civilian population that we are rightly unwilling to undertake.