By infrastructure, I mean at the most basic level a system which can protect the rights of individuals and families. An impartial police force and judicial system. People need to know they can walk down the street or engage in business safely, and if they are wronged have some recourse.

In Iraq right now there are people who are captured, tortured and killed by the police forces and by the Ministry of Interior, agencies charged with protecting them. I don't know about the judicial system, and the reports we get are that the Ministry of Interior, for instance, prisons are "investigated". There doesn't seem to be any recourse. In the US if 20 bodies were dumped in a vacant lot, or 15 heads found along a highway, there would be quite a fuss, I'm sure.

As far as Sunnis and Shiites getting along, I believe that's easier for us to say than them to do. How many of your friends and neighbors would have to be tortured and killed before we vowed revenge? How easy would it be for us to "forgive and forget" when people of our same religion had been tortured with electric drills and then killed simply because they were of our religion?

If we look upon the havoc wreaked upon the world with WTC as an excuse, we can get an idea that we aren't willing to attempt to work together with the perps. (And there were no Iraqis among the perps. Or anyone associated with Iraq.) How far would a politician get if he/she said about WTC, "Stuff happens, time to get along now"? And people are pretty much the same the world over.

I think it is that bad. The Sunnis and Shiites managed to live together under Saddam by dint of the threat of force. Now Bush is trying to do the same thing by force, and not accomplishing it. And if those people hold irrational grudges (Iraq, remember, wasn't part of the WTC plot) the way we do, I don't think a soccer tournament is going to substitute for exacting revenge.

Arf