Exactly.
I don’t really like the hyphenated stuff because once you become part of a country that should be it.
This is VERY different.
They want NO PART of Western culture.
I was STUPID enough to think Iraq would want it.
I know better now.
I visited Sweden and Denmark before the damned bridge was built-———it was better then.
Go Pats!! :-)
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“I was STUPID enough to think Iraq would want it. I know better now”
Me too...
I’m in that same boat. When we were invading Iraq, I had just read Natan Sharansky’s The Case for Democracy - The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror. I really believed Iraqis could be led to repudiate Saddam and embrace Western ideas per his book.
I know better now.
Some of the addresses of prominent tribal families in Iraq, (who did entertain thoughts of ‘non-shia plurality’, or became too friendly with Western entities), became craters in the ground, or were rubble-ized, with inhabitants cooling off to ambient temperatures.
Like a real socialized state, Islam simply cannot allow other beliefs and ideas to exist, as their systems could in time implode. Those systems demand pure compliance of their dependant and docile sheeple.
I knew better after paying attention to the conquest of Lebanon and Iran.
I posted it here a lot when the younger bush went in.
You cannot accomplish anything on the ground in the middle east unless you have the stomach to set up a surveillance state and lethally stamp out Islam over a period of seventy or eighty years, allowing non of the indigenous population in or out.
America doesn’t have the stomach for that, so the only viable wars are punitive wars where you reduce things to rubble and leave them rubble. Congress would need to declare war to pull that off.