Thanks, RandomObserver. How about now?

It looks like your comment was so lame that the internet itself rejected it – that’s really the most likely explanation.

Also blogwhore blah blah blah click my name blogwhore etc etc

I wrote
No J– at 1:02.

You wrote
no J— at 1:02

That’s no em-dash, it’s an mmmm-dash.

Yummy.

As for empires benefiting from their conquests, the oil companies are raking in record profits last I heard; empires tend to benefit those at the top not the industrial workers at the bottom croaking from hideous working conditions as in 19th century Britain.

Well, many of the functional institutions were present in Iraq before Sadaam and before our invasion. We dismantled all of them as part of the “de-Baathification” required by the neo-con puppet masters and not recommended by anyone with a fucking clue.

But since Plan A was the establishment of a US controlled puppet “benign dictatorship” under Chalabi or similar, and THERE WAS NO PLAN B,

I guess “Plan B” could be “treat Iraq like a sym game where we can totally try out all the rad things we learned at Neocon U last year”. I don’t know if they would have loosed the Inexperienced Horde of Yes-folk on Iraq if their good buddy Chalabi had taken over.

Didn’t those empires turn a profit from their invasions? At least for a while?

Where? Mesopotamia.

Is Rule of Law a Martian concept unsuitable to America?

Answering in the affirmative explicitly consigns a society to whatever is not the rule of law: arbitrary detention and punishment, state (and non-state) actors behaving with impunity, rule by personal or oligarchic caprice (or by war-lords), and constantly shifting “rules of the game.”

When people write this sort of stuff does it just plain not occur to them to apply those same standards to ourselves?

Actually looking more and more like the Roman Empire to me…

We are assisting the “development” (as in advancement) of their legal system. In doing so, we must be aware that the system must be perceived as locally run and not an extension of American “imperialism.”

From Shapiro’s “America’s Empire Deficit” (8/15/07), a review of Niall Ferguson’s Colossus:

The point is that when America gets involved in overseas adventures — for whatever reason, from the most realist to the most humanitarian — it inevitably acts like an empire. The sooner it admits this and takes on the role unapologetically, the greater its success can be.

The question, then, is how to organize the “nation-building” — or, to avoid using the somewhat loaded word “nation,” the reconstruction/development work.

[…]

The British India Civil Service (ICS) is a good model for what we need, I think — a civilian body ready to be mobilized as needed, a Peace Corps with teeth that would work in conjunction with the military.

Finally, from Shapiro’s Patton Boggs bio page:

He also worked on the policy staff of the Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign, where he focused on homeland security, legal affairs, and foreign policy.