At some point, people will say "we will do anything you want, just stop bombing us. Are you willing to go down that road?

With Afghanistan? Yes; they attacked us (de-facto, anyways). We had all the moral justification we needed to go in there and do whatever the hell we wanted for a very long time.

With Iraq? Obviously no.

And odograph, I think you're engaging in wishful thinking if you think there was any kind of meaningful democratic tradition in Japan back then. Not that it matters; democracy isn't the important part here; the rule of law is.

I think we did a good enough job creating a Western-like stable society in Japan that we showed we'd have a far better chance of success in Afghanistan than the Brits did. Too bad we never tried.

I think Japan had more of a democratic history than we like to remember (and of course an ordered modernizing society). Germany too.

It makes us feel better to think we created one from scratch ... but from what we know of human nature, that isn't really possible, is it?

I think we did a good enough job creating a Western-like stable society in Japan

True. But how many bombs had to be dropped before their society became malleable? At some point, people will say "we will do anything you want, just stop bombing us. Are you willing to go down that road?

Afghanistan is far more socially cohesive than is Iraq

I've never heard anyone make that claim. Can you support it?

BTW, although interesting it's irrelevant to the original point. The point is not whether Afghanistan is more cohesive than Iraq it's whether either is as or more cohesive than either post-war Germany or Japan. I think the answer is clearly not.

The point of doing it right (from the bottom-up) is precisely to avoid having to use the same awful stuff that went wrong before. You start with total military government over every level - but with a fairly transparent legal system (run by us, but obvious that the rule of law is fair, even if heavy-handed and non-participatory). When that is done to our satisfaction, we start elections at the LOCAL level only. Move your way up over the course of YEARS, not MONTHS, and you hopefully end up with a stable liberal (by the old definition) society.

Rush it through with purple-fingered theatre and you end up with two failed states in waiting that will collapse as soon as we pull out.

McCain/Palin may have been politically wrong in stating that 'the economy was good, and the "fundamentals strong."' because people decided not to vote for them but they were not logically wrong. The US economy cannot forever expand. It must correct itself every so often. The strong fundamentals in a free market are that the corrections don't bring the system to its knees but allow most of us to continue as we always have.

It's interesting that I'm still getting paid every two weeks; buying the same groceries; driving my car; buying gas; paying my mortgage on time; buying Christmas gifts. IMHO, if the media didn't tell them, I'll bet 99% of Americans could not tell you from their own experience that we have been in a recession for a year.

Stop making enemies of average people living in dangerous places.

(When Iraqis, and they were Iraqis, started blowing up their own water treatment plants to spite us, we were lost.)

For the record, I leaned against Afghanistan on practical grounds (I thought the 19th century British experience argued against invasion) but gave it a moral thumbs-up.

I though Iraq failed on both moral and practical grounds, though the practical case was much easier to make: that it would yield more blowback than progress.