But he and those few right there next to him should hold the most marbles, and we have to let them call the shots. Everything that makes the great American experiment work so well is based on us giving out that kind of permission. It's also based on each of us making noise about the way it's being done. Which is what we're doing as we share. It's all a part of the process of changing ourselves (the whole American family). My thoughts right now will pass right over whether we should be in Iraq in the first place. I believe it to be layered in agendas.

We're there. What now?

This part of the world has been fighting with each other forever. It is a way of life, and no generation alive there knows any other way to live. The 21st century is spilling out into the third world in a way hard for us here to imagine. There are no 'corners' of the world to hide from each other any more. We're all reluctantly becoming what we've been all along: one community. One world may be hundreds of years from now (if we don't kill ourselves off), but we've always been 'pushed' toward it. America's melting pot is showing the world how to do it whether they and we are aware of it or not. So....I believe this has given us our strength and, as a child should reach out to one of their parents, America does indeed need to try to help. We're just not very good at it yet and it's dangerous stuff. War's been killing people for a long time now. The people there don't trust us. I don't blame them. The only people there that have felt any security in their lives and life styles were those with connections to the regime. Time, though, is playing tricks on them. The combination of time and their oil holds a real salvation potential. Twentieth century communication is seeping the world picture into their culture despite the Muslim tendency to avoid it. Iraq has been broken apart and we have absolutely no other choice now than to help them build it back up.

It would be great if the United Nations were something more than a great idea. I fear the magnitude and the nature of something that would actually get us all together would not be a pleasant thing at all. America is more than a great idea. It is the actualization and the living history of an old idea. So in the meantime we (all those countries who took it upon ourselves) must attack this whole thing unlike another military venture. We need to flood it with resources. We need them to sense that the bottom's been hit and it's getting better. Yes, this means more soldiers, much more money, more technology and the gradual winning over of the countries unwilling to help. It means time .... years in Iraq. It means helping them use their oil to rebuild without sucking it away from them unfairly.

Can we do this? Of course we can. We're a culture that's melted together into something rather unique...perhaps even destined. Will this hurt our ability to sink money into our own education, research, social security, environmental restoration, on and on? Oh, yes. Which brings us full circle to going there in the first place. The problem is that it's not a circle. It's a spiral whose ends only touch in our collective imagination.

Brian Springer