I finally got around to watching Fahrenheit 9/11 last night. Having young kids does put a crimp in one's movie-watching style. Anyway, apart from it being the first avuncular polemic I've ever encountered, I came away from the movie fairly shocked by the prevalent use of the phrase "hearts and minds" in terms of the Iraq War.

I thought I'd been paying attention, but I could recall only sporadic references to "winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people," a phrase which ought to haunt anyone alive during the Vietnam War. After all, the American "advisors" were supposedly "hearts and minding" the Vietnamese. We all know how that worked out.

But "hearts and minds" has been used increasingly frequently. I did a quick check on the New York Times site and found countless references to "hearts and minds" in the last month. Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense at the end of the Vietnam War, and now he's presiding over a similar debacle. Some people never learn.

To my knowledge, goodwill has never been established by the use of force. Ask a Pole, or a Korean, or anyone from southeast Asia, and they'll tell you: We may have been conquered from time to time, but we never gave in to the occupiers, and eventually we prevailed.

Given the chance, people wish to determine their own affairs. This might be through a dictatorship or monarchy or whathaveyou, but I think it's fair to say that people prefer a dictatorship of their own making than one imposed upon them.

In the end, the notion that through war we might "ignite the fires of democracy" is the most galling folly of the entire Iraq adventure. Oh, "we will be welcomed like liberators" and "we know Saddam has weapons of mass destruction" and "mission accomplished" and so forth are real doozies, but this notion that we (or anyone) can use war as a method of promoting democracy is just plain crazy. Some ignorant people point to our occupation of Japan after World War II, but in truth, Japan had a national legislature and conducted legit elections long before the war. The same can be said of Nazi Germany. Hitler manipulated the process to get into power (and crippled it after he came to power), but Germans as a people had a reasonable grasp on the principles of a democratic society.

This is not true in Iraq, which has never held a free and fair election in its short history. So we're foisting something of a foreign idea onto the Iraqi people. Even more stupid, our soldiers are expected to inspire admiration of America and its supposed democratic ideals while arresting and killing Iraqis. Talk about an impossible mission. I don't know about you, but when someone shoves a gun in my face and tells me to get down on the ground, I don't immediately think, "Hey, I like this guy's style."

I don't know how the Iraqi election will go. I sincerely hope that it goes well and peacefully. I hope that the insurgents decide to lay down their weapons and pledge to work with whatever government is elected. I hope our soldiers will start coming home on February 1.

But all that is highly unlikely. We've brought this chaos on ourselves and, most unfortunately, on the troops that we've sent overseas. When I read the death notices (and I try to read them all), I take each loss personally. Those people died because of me. I may not have voted for the Prez. I may not support any of the policies which led to our occupation of Iraq. But I'm still an American, and those people went to Iraq because of me.

And I'm still mad as hell about that.

Jon Worley doesn't know how to fix all the problems of the world, but that doesn't mean he isn't willing to fake it from time to time.