Well we're not seeing everybody attacking us and the brits weren't putting up power plants and wells. I understand ur point. I think things are shifting there. We're trying to get out of the fighting Iraqi business and more into the killing AQ business. I think its working. It took us almost 10 years to figure out Vietnam and how to fight there, so I think we're seeing the same thing in Iraq. From a historical perspective, I think we're seeing the same thing.
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America was a British colony and they had a lot of pounds invested in the infrastructure.
I'm not sure you have the time for this, but here's a link that compares the British/american colony with America/Iraq.
http://www.cceia.org/resources/transcripts/1033.htmlHere are some excerpts:
There are three fundamental differences between American power and British power a century ago, and they explain not only why the United States has had problems in the past in imposing its will in foreign countries but also why it is experiencing problems today in imposing its will on its two present colonies of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The first is what might be called the manpower deficit. The proportion of the American population which is enlisted in the armed forces has been declining steadily since certainly the mid-1980s, arguably since the time of the Korean War.
The United States has yet to work out a way of making other people fight its wars in the way that the British made the Indians provide a very large part of their armed forces in the 19th—and indeed in the 20th—century.
...An empire in the end, no matter how much technology can deliver, is about footprints on the ground. The United States imports people; it doesn't export them. Its manpower deficit is, therefore, one of its characteristic weaknesses and one of the reasons why, by comparison with the much smaller British Empire of a century ago, it has more difficulty in making its institutions stick when it tries to plant them overseas.
The second, economic deficit is one I hardly need to tell you about. It is a fiscal deficit, a balance of payments of deficit, and, according to some economists, a generational deficit of mind-boggling proportions.
...In economic and fiscal terms, the United States is not quite the empire it seems when first we consider its resources because it is primarily an empire of consumption, and not of development. Its indifference, even to the Middle East as an area for investment, is very striking when one considers the statistics for U.S. foreign direct investment [FDI].
...There is
one final difference between British and American empire. The most important deficit, which lames American power, is an attention deficit. ...Until American politicians, opinion formers, and voters grasp that undertakings, whether they are called "colonization" or "nation building," take time—that they cannot be accomplished within a two-year election cycle, that they may not even be accomplished within a decade—the United States should desist from such activities.
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The discussion from that link is not anti-US imperialism. On the contrary, the author concludes that the US is just doing it wrong.
