Billmon

Billmon: "Which may be the answer to why Iraq (and, increasingly Afghanistan) have turned into such fiascos, and why this really was inevitable all along.

These weren't wars of liberation, they were old-fashioned colonial interventions -- even if the purposes were not colonial conquest and exploitation. (Note the use of the conditional tense.) And, like many old-fashioned colonial interventions, they required the colonial power to take sides in a pre-existing civil war or rivalry between ethnic groups. In the old days, this was usually by conscious design -- such conflicts being seen as ripe opportunities for imperial expansion."