The reason it's so difficult to oppose lawful democracy is that we have so few alternatives to compare it to. - Curtis Yarvin

The war in Iraq is an American civil war by proxy. The real prize of this war is political power in the United States. If the US military wins, the Republicans win. If the US military loses, the Democrats win. We saw the exact same thing in Vietnam, and given that, in general, the Republicans are the Democrats' punching bag, the result is pretty inevitable.

The fact that governments are useful to the inhabitants of their territory is a purely secondary and emergent property. They need to be useful, because a government that does not provide at least basic security will not find itself with any rents to collect.

One of the classical symptoms of decadence is that young aristocrats spend all their time on political scheming, and it'd be hard to say we don't see this now.