This is why American efforts in Iraq will fail

From the Associated Press via Yahoo!...

25 Killed in Car-Bomb Attacks in Iraq

Wed Jan 5, 4:12 PM ET

By DUSAN STOJANOVIC, Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A suicide attacker blew up an explosives-laden car outside a police academy south of Baghdad on Wednesday, killing 20 people, and another car bomb left five Iraqi policemen dead. Despite the surge of violence aimed at derailing this month's elections, Iraq (news - web sites)'s interim leader again insisted the ballot would go ahead as planned.

"We will not allow the terrorists to stop the political process in Iraq," Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said as the death toll from insurgent attacks topped 90 over four days this week. "The elections process is the basis for the deepening of the national unity in Iraq."

We should pull out all our troops. Now. We should never have gone into Iraq. Ever.

You cannot "give" a people their democracy. And the authority for self-rule was never ours to grant anybody, at all. That authority can only come from the Establisher of ALL authority: namely, God. And if we haven't learned how to manage our own authority that He gave to us, how dare we tell another nation how to manage its own... much less be so haughty as to believe that we can give it to them of our own sense of ego.

If the people of Iraq desired enough that they be rid of Saddam Hussein, then they should have risen up against him. On their own. And they could have done so, if they had mustered the will and the drive and the courage to overcome Saddam and his minions. But apart from some pockets of resistance they were too timid to reach out and grasp that freedom on their own.

We are making a terrible, terrible mistake in Iraq, now almost two years into this venture and at the cost of 1300-some American lives. And no amount of spin or platitude from this government can deny this fact: those young men and women who sprang from our own soil died for nothing. Nothing at all. They perished for something absent of any sense or rationale except for the empty rhetoric that "it's for our country" or "we're keeping our families free"... when freedom here vanishes with each new day.

How then can we expect to give freedom to a people who have never even known it to begin with?

Freedom must be earned. It can never be bestowed. At least by any man.

And that lack of humility is why we fail in Iraq, and will always fail.