It is amazing to me that when someone posts a logical refutation to your comments, you immediately discount the evidence. While there have been fraudulent people involved in Japan's banking system recently, the entire system is not a sham. I actually take that comment a bit personally, as my mother's cousin helped set the system up during the occupation.
Japan's culture was a feudal, militaristic monarchy even more isolated from the west than is Iraq. Iraq has an educated population, a prior history of self government, and a willing group of exiles who want to return and rebuild their country.
While I think we will not get out of Iraq in one year (because we will be hunting down all the hidden munitions, chemicals, and bio-weapons), I also take this administration at its word. We go to liberate Iraq, not to colonize it.
IT doesn't matter if the best of people set up their banking system along western lines. It is still an asian culture and was run along those lines. Sub contractors taking loses for decades and hiding them for their traditional benefactors and patrons. Not only the banking system but the entire accounting system in Japan is in a shambles. Only now is it getting better.
I can't help what you make personal. You posted an exmaple of why you thought it would be easy to remake Iraq in our image - I posted why I thought it not only a bad example but also how it was partly false to begin with. That you made it personal is your problem.
Iraq does indeed have an educated population of exiles. Are they all the same religion? From the same tribe? From the same clan and hometown? There is no "Iraqi" nationality. That is a farce. Iraq is a phoney nation cobled together by the British empire and since "independence" has only been held together by a brutal central strongman supported by western governments.
Again- to think we can make a nation out of a collection of tribes and groups that was never a real nation is folly. Haven't we learned from Wilson's "Yugoslavia"?