Mr Wolf and JC both have valid points. We cannot civillize the world. And just who on God’s green earth gave us the right or the damned duty in the first place. If some liberial whiny “lets fix it all” moron want to let them do it. But no one individual, or group of individuals, has the right to force the citizens of any nation to stoop to the resort to force to enforce that individual’s view, even if they are a majority. The last I looked the word democracy was not in the Constitution. However, the term Republic is.
You know, “all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights… .”

The last time I checked the standing Army was to be used to repell invasion and insurrection. Of course when someone attacks us we have the right to sudue the aggressor. I haven’t seen the amendment that says it can be used for some one’s pet war.

We need to educate ourselves about the meaning of this document because a great many of our so called leaders don’t seem to be able to read.

This would build a hell of a lot of political clout. And hey, its even constirutional;
“Grant letters of Mark and Reprisal”.

Except the US doesn’t do colonization…outside the Phillipines, Panama…

I’m going to play devil’s advocate, and suggest we out neo-con the neo cons. I argue the time is ripe for the return of imperialism.

Ideologically the world is stuck with the ill thought out consequences of the anti-Imperial ideal — much publicised by Woodrow Wilson — that races are the same thing as cultures and should all have their own nations.

That works, sort of, in Island nations and bits of Western Europe. Elsewhere it has bought us the ongoing success stories of peace harmony and rational debate that are Zionist Palestine and Pakistan. From Beiruit the Burundi, Belfast to Berlin, multicultural nationalism does not work. It does not work in the confused over lapping tribalism of Africa, The Middle East, Central Asia, the Balkans. It did not work — until colonization — in places like Australia, New Zealand and the Americas.

Even in the home of the Nation State, Western Europe some 200 years ago, the idea that peoples formed natural nations seems silly;- Belgium could have been divided between France and Holland, the lowland scots had more in common with the English than those Collodened Highlanders, all the Scandanavian nations were one people with one culture, while Italy and Germany were anything but…and couldn’t even understand each other’s language… (yes the whole question was academic, because Napoleonic France ruled the lot of it — okay it was the the last time Frane won anything, unless you call Verdun a victory).

My point it respect for self determination prevents anyone stepping in to sort out messes like Somalia.

Democracy alone, as we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, is not a cure when the people are ignorant and uneducated and kept so, when the media that might inform them is in effect in the hands of religion and partisan propaganda.

To sort out these nations involves not merely ocupation, but a benign imperialism; governance, education and honest media — which criticises of the occupation force, and has the freedom to throw shoes at the President. And then and only then will they eventually be fit to vote as equals in the Empire. (I think the failure of most recent empires has been their inability to include those they come to control; let me be plain, there must be no taxation without representation).

To finish I give you one instance, from the end of the last great Empire, the English one. As America was becoming bogged down seeking a purely military solution in Veitnam, this sort of solution was used by a small and cheap commonwealth force to end Indonesian and Chinese backed insurrection in Malaya, (one of the those forgotten wars that may be unexiting, but also quite enlightening).

I say it is time for the Empire to strike back!

How should a world power try to stabilize an anarchic country like Somalia? I hope we don’t use Iraq as a model; it just doesn’t fit. The situation is much closer to that of Afghanistan, where numerous warring tribal factions have held everything but the cities for millenia. How does an external force create a national identity and cohesion where none has previously existed?