It’s more dangerous being America’s ally than its enemy.

[Jan Van]

We're gone from Iraq, how can we be defeated?

Found this an interesting read:
An Iraqi Perspective: How America’s Destruction of Iraqi Society Led to Today’s Chaos

[Pointedstick]

That was a very interesting read, thanks for posting. 

A question for the anarchists:  With the power vacuum in Iraq after the U.S. invasion, why didn't the free market take over?  Just an uneducated populace?

Not so much uneducated as violent and primitive, as crude and politically incorrect that may be. They didn't have much of a market tradition and clearly accept rule by strongmen. Not only that, but they appear largely unwilling to serviceably defend their homes and lands when threatened, whether by foreign powers or Islamic terrorists.

If a Private Society is to come about, it will not be created by people who accept violence over trade and prefer flight or surrender to defending their land and property.

[Pointedstick]

Crap, I just googled "Private Society" and all I get is porn sites.

Oh shit, gotta change that…

Anyway, I think I know what you mean by the term.  But here's one thing I can't get my head around, regarding "anarchy" or private society ... if there was some way to establish something like that ... say, for example, that we all moved to NH and seceded from the U.S., what would prevent the neighboring (or not neighboring) countries from invading and enslaving us?  I mean, wouldn't the concept of private society require us to convert all the world's peoples simultaneously before it would be practical?

Anticipating this question, it's the very first chapter in my in-progress book.

Here's an excerpt:

In the end, any society worth defending will be defended. If enemies approach a town or country and almost nobody is willing to step up to fight in the defense of their home, that is a sad reflection on the society itself: the people are voting with their apathy that their society is not really worth the effort of preserving. If this is the case, it will be impossible to get people to muster a defense and exceedingly difficult even to coerce them into military service; they will feign illness, desert often, and fight poorly, as governments attempting to force their own citizens into fighting unpopular conflicts have discovered. History shows that societies with such demoralized, apathetic populations never last long in the face of aggression. If the Private Society winds up in this sad state of affairs, it will be indefensible—end of story. Nothing will be able to save it when attackers close in, government or no.

If instead, a few or even many of the Private Society's residents decide it is worth defending when a threat emerges, then the question becomes how these volunteers will become organized into an effective fighting force. But it turns out that extensive military coordination is more important for campaigns of aggression than the defense of one's homeland. Ad hoc, organically-organized citizens' defense forces with a certain amount of foreign assistance have proven extremely capable when paired with modern weapons, as the Jewish Kibbutz and Vietnamese peasant examples demonstrate. The combination of grit, determination, knowledge of local terrain and conditions, and possession of modern weaponry is an exceptionally potent response to external threats, even given inferior training and only loose organization. Furthermore, the Private Society's defense and security firms would face strong incentives to organize their own employees into a formal fighting force, even cooperating with one another and inviting volunteers to forge a powerful but temporary military force. Not to do so would be to increase the likelihood of conquest, and being conquered is generally bad for business!

[Pointedstick]

And if anyone comes up with a better term than "Private Society," I'll credit you in the book!

[MediumTex]

Iraq was never really a country so much as the result of a cartographer's game of Tetris in the middle east.

No one should be surprised to see a country that was never really a country disintegrate when there is no longer a strong man to keep everyone in line and in fear.

Picture an ant farm version of the Soviet Union with less alcohol consumption and that was Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

The real foolishness of the second Iraq War will begin to unfold as the U.S. tries to figure out how to fix Iraq without committing 50,000 U.S. troops for another 10 years. 

What the U.S. has been doing with Iraq for many years has been akin to arguing that a brick is aerodynamic because the edges have been filed down a few millimeters.

If you read the history of the last 100 years in the middle east, almost every problem seems to come back to some hare-brained western scheme to steal natural resources or to help someone else steal them.

Think about the last five wars in the Iraq/Iran/Afghanistan neighborhood, and how the U.S. basically either started each of them (i.e., Iraq I, Iraq 2 and Afghanistan 2001-present) or frantically tried to broaden them (i.e., Iran-Iraq war and Soviet occupation of Afghanistan) in order to meet U.S. foreign policy objectives.

And what did all of those shenanigans in that neighborhood achieve?  Iraq is looking like a failed state,  Afghanistan is clearly a failed state, and any stability that Iran enjoys is in spite of the best effort of the U.S. to destabilize that country.

[Pointedstick]

And if you think about it, what was Iraq before it was artificially created by western powers? It was a province of the Ottoman Empire, an authoritarian state ruled with violence and fear. The people of the middle east hadn't been self-governing in 400 years. Little wonder they're so bad at it.

[Libertarian666]

And if anyone comes up with a better term than "Private Society," I'll credit you in the book!

How about something wild, like, oh, "Free society"?

[MediumTex]

And if you think about it, what was Iraq before it was artificially created by western powers? It was a province of the Ottoman Empire, an authoritarian state ruled with violence and fear. The people of the middle east hadn't been self-governing in 400 years. Little wonder they're so bad at it.

Perhaps one day the U.S. will realize that you can't impose democracy externally, no matter how much you would like to.

[Pointedstick]

The core problem with democracy is that it requires a certain type of population to function as intended. You can't just implement it anywhere. This makes it a non-robust system, because even when the population currently supports it, the population can change over time. Swap out an educated people with strong common bonds and a shared culture, with a bunch of people having little education, different histories, and personal enmities, and then the whole thing breaks down, transforming into a system for allowing the majority to oppress the minority with impunity and then dissolving into warlordism and sectarian violence with a weak state unable to control people, which is exactly what happens when it's implemented in second and third world countries.

[Xan]

The title of this thread reminds me of "The Mouse That Roared", both a book and a Peter Sellers movie, in which a tiny European duchy declares war on the United States in order to swiftly lose, and then become the recipient of billions of dollars of Marshall-Plan-like rebuilding money.  They accidentally end up winning, though.