Raoul said there was nobody shooting at our troops after Germany surrendered--he said Germany, I didn't--and I showed that at least one military group had undergone such problems. The article also showed problems with sanitation, utilities, governing, and other issues we face in Iraq. If you didn't get anything useful out of it, maybe other people did.

Iraq is not an exact analogy of either postwar Germany or Japan, but there are some lessons to be learned from both.

So Japan gave us very little trouble. I dare say if we had dropped a couple of fission bombs on Iraq's major cities, the remaining Iraqis may have been pretty damn compliant as well. Is that how you wanted us to conduct this war? From the very beginning, our military has undertaken tactics and strategies that have placed our forces in extra danger to avoid unnecessary damage and killing innocent Iraqis. One way of looking at it is that the casualties we are taking now are in lieu of bombing into rubble the Iraqi cities where these attackers are hiding out. Is this a fair trade? Some people might think so. Some would not. But scorched-earth policies would end the problem. Is that what we want?

We occupied Japan--as you say, a non-resisting nation--for seven years.

It's been three frigging months since May 1st.

I remember when a lot of the same people screaming "quagmire" now were saying the same thing when we hadn't finished the war in a week. Must be the video-game generation.

From any objective standards, things are going better than most people would have expected. Before the war ended, even I would have laid fifty-fifty odds that a nation as thoroughly ethnically divided and stuffed with conventional weapons would have decayed into an all-out civil war as soon as Saddam was gone. It hasn't happened. Yet. A lot of other possible disasters didn't happen either.

It might be nice if some politicians and others stopped trying to figure out the best way to remove Bush's nuts with a vice grip pliers and tried to contribute something constructive towards creating the first real Muslim democracy in the Middle East.