re: #195 jamesfirecat

I suspect that if we were going to get Iraq or Afghanistan to work we needed to have been willing to actually do nation building in line with what we did in Japan/Germany where we squat over the nation and be all “You lost a war to us, so we get to make all the decisions for what happens to your people for a while until we’re sure you’re ready to take over” but I don’t think there was the political capital to support that sort of approach so instead we insisted that if we just kicked the door down killed a few tyrants then the people would instantly rise up and create a perfect democracy….

Japan was and is a unified society, with a more or less single culture and millennia of shared history. And they wanted to be part of the world community, such as it is. Iraq and Afghanistan were cobbled together from parts at hand by foreigners who knew little about them. What worked for Japan was never going to work for either of them.