Sad milestone, continued...

[spidergoat]

We occupied Germany and Japan with far more troops per capita.

When Germany surrendered in May 1945, the U.S. Army had more than 1.6 million men within the borders of the defeated Nazi state. Overnight they became occupation troops: Their orders were to spread out over every square mile of German territory and demonstrate without a doubt that they were in charge. U.S. troops secured every road junction, bridge, border post, government building, factory, bank, warehouse; anything of the slightest conceivable importance had a guard of GIs around it, and so did a good many things of little or no importance, too.

Army plans called for an occupation force of some 400,000 in the American zone for the first 18 months — or one U.S. soldier for every 40 Germans.

[Neildo]

But isn't that exactly what we did in Japan?, Germany?, and we did free them, and establish two Free Democracies.

Our initial reason for attacking them wasn't to convert them to a democracy. Not only that, but we kind of killed hundreds of thousands of their people which showed them we mean business so they had no other choice but to do what we said.

In Iraq tho, we went in with the sole reason to convert the Iraqis to a democracy, and as Spidergoat mentioned, the Arabs there are culturally quite different from the Japanese and Germans. And with us trying to promote democracy, it means we have to kill as little civilians as possible which make us look weak, but there's nothing we can do about that as taking any brutal action to show who's in charge would be in conflict of trying to promote democracy similar to us wanting to get rid of Saddam because he tortures his civilians only for us to have Abu Graib happen.

- N

[Buffalo Roam]

Neildo, No Neildo we went to Iraq to enforce the 28, February 1991, Cease Fire, Which Saddam was Failing to live up to, after we removed Saddam, the mission was to reestablish a Iraqi government, and the model we chose was a democratic form, which would include personal freedoms for all Iraqi's, the Iraqi's have voted three time, to establish a Government, based on the parliamentary system, and all three time the votes were over 60%, reaching a high in the high 70%, so with a vote in the high 70% I would say that we have a legitimate Government in power, and it is the disgruntled few that are causing the problems with help from outside agitators. As for them being culturally different quite obvious, but that does not mean that democracy doesn't work for them, lets finish the job and see, not quit, if you quit you never get anywhere, and you loose, and if we loose there it won't stop there, it will just put more blood in the water, and they will follow us back home and then your friend and neighbors will be the ones dieing, and the war will be in our back yard's.