Yes. Although it was slower than we like, Sherman’s march to the sea did much to move the Confederacy toward democracy with participation from all the people. Terrorists, and discouragement on the part of the Americans back home, slowed the effort, but it ultimately bore fruit.

Now here we are again. Let’s not take a hundred years to do this job.

Too bad about the infrastructure and the setback to Lebanese democracy. However, infrastructure can be replaced. And given what the war has revealed about the extent of Hezbollah’s power, it may be that the imminence of Lebanese democracy was an illusion.

Defeating these enemies and husbanding the growth of democratic governments is going to take many years and will not be cheap.

We cheered the cedars revolution, but now we’re taking a chainsaw to the trees.

Seems like there must be a cheaper way to promote democracy. Iraq’s standing at what – a half trillion?

I’d feel a lot better about this if our social engineering on other countries at the point of a gun were producing more than blood and rubble in the sand. I’m worried that karma stuff is going to come back around and kick our grandkids in the butt.

Big-time terrorism doesn’t happen in a political vacuum. It is sponsored by governments that provide money, weapons and refuge. By punishing the people who run those governments we make terrorism a much less attractive tactic than it previously was.

By promoting democracy in erstwhile dictatorships that sponsored terrorism and/or other attacks against us we help to give ordinary people in those countries both a stake in reasonable government and the means to create such government. That helps them as a byproduct, but mainly it helps us because democratic governments generally have little incentive to fight us. It is therefore a reasonable strategy for us to follow.

If anyone has a plan that would work better I’d like to hear it.

What would we like to impose — I mean what would we like to see happen for the good of the people who live in these autocratic nation states?

Sherman made his march to the sea, and Bush made his march to Baghdad. We can definitely take down infrastructure and destroy nation-states. Does that move people toward democracy?

The non-state organizations seem to be more slippery than nation-states. I’m not sure what the answers are, but it’s not clear to me that wholesale destruction is necessarily working in our best interests.