[BlueTrain]

I wouldn't say the founding fathers fought a civil war. I'm not even sure it was a revolution in the sense that the French or Russian revolutions were. But that's a fine point.

I think the behavior of soldiers, any soldier from most any country, in the field does not necessarily reflect government policy. There may be some government policy, such as the Germans had, to do certain things but it would probably be separate and apart from the behavior of most of the soldiers. The reason is because soldiers are in the business of killing. It is probably difficult to be killing one moment and civil the next. Those who misbehaved in the prison scandal were also prison guards back home.

You are correct that the founding fathers did have a distrust of a strong central government. That's why they tried another system for a few years before they decided maybe it wasn't such a bad idea. Why don't we just abolish the federal government? It's the current trend, you know. We already have all those perfectly functional state governments. Sounds like a lot of duplication of government, doesn't it?