"You imply that we should "teach people about American culture". Sure, but before they are receptive to being taught, they must first become friends, and before that, AMERICANS must learn enough about them to become their friends, not their invaders and opressors. Thjere is a simple logic here. If Americans insist that the world becomes lioke them and learns their culture as a prerequisite to acceptance, then the overwhelming outcome will be rejection."

No, I meant teach America Soldiers about America Culture. My point was that even knowing what we know best the task would be difficult. Whereas Iraq was a Soviet Client, a closed society with handlers and secert police. And on top of this, the best way to learn about say French culture, etc, is go there and live there for a while. And based on this, the America policy of having soldiers there 12 months instead 6 months is a better way of doing this.

"If the US is serious about having a world-wide "Empire", then it must learn from successful and unsuccsesful empires of the past."

America isn't serious about world-wide empire. That is problem of course if you are going to occupy a country. That was a fundemental problem, but since we are no longer occuping Iraq. And we are more in a situation like we are anywhere else in the world where we have troops- like say S Korea.
America is serious about maintaining global security and therefore emphasis on Navy and Airforce and Marine. With Army still stuck in fighting major conflict with Soviets.
What America needs to do is get more nations involved in maintaining Global security- because of course, the Cold War is actually over. The problem is other nations are used to America handling most of the load in regards to Global security.

"One of the problems with the strategy of killing-off "bad" leaders is that it leaves a power vacuum into which thugs, drug barons, and opportunists will step - few honourable people will take up leadership roles if their predecessors have been assasinated. This is one of the counter-productive aspects of Israel's dealings with the Palestinians - they have systematically killed off any legitimate leaders, leaving only brigands to run the show."

Oh, I agree with you strongly on this point. That is exactly what Israel did wrong and it's for this reason I place a fair amount of blame on the Israel side of things. I think America needs to do better in this aspect, but we are too bad in this aspect. You can't say we did the same mistake as Israel did- for example I don't think there is a shortage of good leadership in Iraq. But we do need to get more in the head of say Muqtada al-Sadr and get Muqtada al-Sadr to see how to lead in a manner which is successful rather destructive.