As you can see from these maps, Allied forces now hold every part of both Iraq and Afghanistan. We have no part of either of them left to conquer, not since Hamid Karsai rose to power and Saddam Hussein dropped out of office. Still, with rebels sabotaging their own country's oil facilities, gas at four dollars a gallon and the Taliban having tea with the Afghani President, this doesn't feel much like victory. Still, could it?
Now I live for a while in Chicago, and ever so often I have to compare our victories in the middle east with the the Chi-Town police department's "victory" over the the street gangs. Yes, on one hand, nobody actually puts "gangstuh" on his resume. On the other hand though, the people in the city's west side are either too scared or too supportive of the Kings, the Bloods and the Crips to call the police, and so they go on selling criminal goods and services with almost no fear of a legal consequence.
The countries of the Middle East may just be like the west side. Basically, in both cases the people living there see the supposed forces of order as at least something of an occupying force and, even in clear evidence of the benefits of the presence of such enforcers, they prefer to avoid or possibly even subvert them. Oh, we do have a few advantages in Chicago. The population speaks the same language as the cops, and they usually have roughly the same ideas about God and democracy. Still,we do seem to be losing that war simply because of our overall unpopularity with the general populace, and we probably shouldn't think we're going to do any better in a more complex place like Arabia.
A side thought: we probably should've had a rotation policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then our soldiers there would've had the same chance as Chicago cops to tell us when a policy was working and when it wasn't.
Hell, maybe we just should've given Iraq to Kuwait. Hell, in some ways they wanted to be together.
Just a few thoughts....
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