Prime Minister Maliki compares what’s going on in Iraq with the American civil war. Such a comparison testifies to the gross ignorance that prevails about our history today. America had 70 years of reasonably competent self-government before the civil war broke out. America had no foreign interferences in her civil war, and did not need a greater power’s occupying army to prop up her government. America’s pre-independence culture was not a tribal culture but was steeped in the British tradition of the rights of citizens. America had Christianity, not Islam, as its majority religion, and had achieved the separation of church and state. Also, Americans had not put Islamic fundamentalists in office. Finally, America had Lincoln, who understood her principles and could talk about them in terms specific to the conflict at hand, not in generalized abstractions about ”freedom” as the right of everyone on earth right now, regardless of cultural formation or the lack of any pre-existing civic institutions.