Where does this world exist, besides in the minds of rich westerners and other naive idealists who already have plenty of everything they need? If anything, the world is heading towards all-out materialism, mass consumption, getting richer (not just the rich getting richer). Indians and Chinese want more of what the west has and why shouldn’t they? How many of these people want to hear rich westerners telling them about the ‘evils’ of consumerism, etc?

Of course, the biggest difference is that Iraq was a SOVEREIGN nation. It wasn’t divided. It wasn’t recovering from a terrible colonial occupation. It wasn’t shattered. You just don’t go invading sovereign nations unless you’re asking for trouble, and the USA got it.

“History repeats itself only in outline, not in detail.”

Yeah, and like Vietnam, the U.S. will de defeated, once again, because you can’t invade a nation of people bonded by whatever bonds they might have–language, religion, food, music, etc, and expect them to love you more than their neighbors, who, although they might be hated, aren’t as hated as much as the dreaded invaders toting TV sets and cheeseburgers.

I like the article. Well written. But the guy is wrong. The USA is NOT the cat’s meow. The world is enjoying a new paradigm shift, and it’s away from materialism, mass consumption, and the rich getting richer, if only for the fact that we are finding out there are barriers to these trends.

In fairness Iraqis do work much harder compared to other countries in the middle east but are no where near the diligence of Koreans. When I was over there sheiks kept looking at Americans to rebuild the country for them instead of them rebuilding the country for themselves. This caused a lot of friction initially but Iraqis are beginning to rebuild things on their own with their own government’s money which will cause them to take more ownership in the country.

It tooks years after the Korean War for Korea to get a leader (Park Chung-hee) to harness Korea’s potential and may take years in Iraq for a real leader to emerge as well.

It doesn’t count against my one-comment-per-post average if I simply say this sentence made me nearly laugh some sort of liquid through my nose.

By the way, I agree with most of what you wrote. Time to start planning more television spots for AFN-I.

Forget about all this insurgent stuff, and break it down to the most two basic elements “What’s good for America” and “What’s bad for America’s enemies”

America arrived in Japan because it wanted to win the war. It planned to put a submissive governemt in place and then leave. However, it found that it Japan was in striking distance of all of Americas communist enemies except France. So it decided to stick around.

Having troops in Japan was “good for America” because it allowed the US to nuke commies without getting out of bed in the morning, and “bad for America’s enemies” because it meant that America could bearth an invasion fleet off of their shores and there was nothing that they could do about it.

60 years later, Yokohama is still full of drunken GIs looking for beer, sex and cheap porn.

Now, look at Iraq. Iraq. Not only is Iraq rich in oil, but it puts America in striking distance of just about every Muslim in the world country except France.

I predict that in 2072, there will be more American ex-pats in Iraq than in Saudi.

But the whole situation is different.

In 1953, the United States was dealing with the southern half of “one” nation (the whole two countries, one nation thing), while in Iraq, we pretty much have three different nations who only are in one “country” because that’s how a bunch of punch drunk Europeans felt like carving up that part of the defunct Ottoman Empire.

The gates of hell are on the cusp of opening up on Iraq, and God knows where everything will endup.

Vietnamese people fought for nothing, basically. Look at them. They love living in America, getting their US higher education degrees, and they’re really eager to have trade with the US. Basically they love living better, too. Look at all the recent Vietnamese immigrants to the US, via families already in the US and so forth. They’re willing to leave Vietnam in their 20’s and take up a whole new language.

Someday Iraq and the Middle East will be like that. This is my opinion, by the way. Hack it all you want.

Muslim kids in the US probably wouldn’t be accepted in certain parts of the Middle East.