That the US has the best government for everyone. We think it is best because most of us were raised in it. Even other democracies see problems in our practices.

You cannot GIVE freedom to a person.

You cannot bestow democracy on a nation.

Sept. 11 rubbed in the lesson that global power is still measured by military capability. The Europeans discovered that they lacked the military instruments to be taken seriously and that their erstwhile defenders, the Americans, regarded them, in a moment of crisis, with suspicious contempt.

Eventually, all "power" derives from the ability to destroy. The military is the best understood and most easily deployed aspect of destruction.

Nation-building seeks to reconcile imperial power and local self-determination through the medium of an exit strategy. This is imperialism in a hurry: to spend money, to get results, to turn the place back to the locals and get out. But it is similar to the old imperialism in the sense that real power in these zones -- Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan and soon, perhaps, Iraq -- will remain in Washington.

Because we aren't building nations. We want PUPPETS.

We don't want allies. We want vassals.

They cannot rebuild each failed state or appease each anti-American hatred, and the more they try, the more they expose themselves to the overreach that eventually undermined the classical empires of old.

The world is not safe. It will never be safe. People will not like you. People might even hate you.

As the North Korean case shows, America needs to share the policing of nonproliferation and other threats with these powers, and if it tries, as the current National Security Strategy suggests, to prevent the emergence of any competitor to American global dominance, it risks everything that Gibbon predicted: overextension followed by defeat.

We will bankrupt our nation.

Radical Islam would never have succeeded in winning adherents if the Muslim countries that won independence from the European empires had been able to convert dreams of self-determination into the reality of competent, rule-abiding states.

We did not WANT them to be. We wanted them dependant upon our good-will and our weapons. Without our good-will, they would not get our weapons and their neighbors (using our weapons) would invade them.

Its solution -- to create democracy in Iraq, then hopefully roll out the same happy experiment throughout the Middle East -- is both noble and dangerous: noble because, if successful, it will finally give these peoples the self-determination they vainly fought for against the empires of the past; dangerous because, if it fails, there will be nobody left to blame but the Americans.

We are NOT going to create a democracy in Iraq. We want a PUPPET. We'd even take another Saddam IF the other Saddam would side with the US. Hell, we'd even give him weapons then.

Just as we did with this Saddam when he was fighting against Iran.

The reason is simply that, however right these principles may be, the political form in which they are realized -- the nationalist nation-building project -- so often delivers liberated colonies straight to tyranny, as in the case of Baath Party rule in Iraq, or straight to chaos, as in Bosnia or Afghanistan.

Again, because you cannot GIVE freedom to someone.

For every nationalist struggle that succeeds in giving its people self-determination and dignity, there are more that deliver their people only up to slaughter or terror or both.

Now, trace back the origin of the weapons used by those doing the slaughter, imposing the terror and so forth.

The case for empire is that it has become, in a place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and stability alike.

Wrong. If we worked with the OTHER nations there and helped bring THEM to democracy, Iraq would, eventually, convert.

Every nation in the mid-east KNOWS that the US is lieing about freedom and democracy. If it ever came down to it, the US would invade and TAKE the oil rather than deal with a self-deterministic nation.