If you totally destroy the social fabric of a small country, what do you expect to happen? Just wipe out all means of survival. Destroy the cities, factories, homes, roads, communication system, displace millions and leave them destitute. Will they happily greet those who ruined their country and their lives? Will everything be stable and predictable?
Hard core toadies to the rich and powerful, and just plain dimwits like “journalist” Tom Friedman or “statesman” John McCain can’t figure it out. How could the Sunni jihadis be making a big comeback? After all the US did for Iraq: we spent trillions to “fix” the country for western democracy. Our invasion was a great success for democracy…how could things “suddenly” have gone wrong?
There is a precedent for this. In 1975, after years of B-52 terror bombing of the Cambodian countryside, a truly crazed organization, the Khmer Rouge took power. Their first act was to empty all the cities and imprison everyone in rural peasant communes, starving them and working them to death. The backbone of the Khmer Rouge were teenaged (and younger) country people whose villages had been bombed into oblivion by our wonderful western democracy.
Cambodia, along with North and South Vietnam and Laos was part of the theater of battle during the Vietnam war. A neutralist government headed by Prince Nordoom Sihanouk was ousted and a pliable US puppet, General Lon Nol, was installed. The US said they wanted to “interdict” the movement of supplies from North Vietnam to the National Liberation Front soldiers in the south that were moving along roads inside Cambodia. In 1970 Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia triggered the massive anti-war uprising on US campuses against this escalation (leading also to the killing of students at Kent State University in Ohio).
But before the Cambodian invasion and for years after, the US relentlessly wiped out villages in the countryside, hoping to “dry up” the sea in which the ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge were recruiting. B-52 bombings succeeded wildly, totally wrecking the whole nation of Cambodia.
By turning Cambodia into fire and brimstone, the US military campaign paved the way for the living hell of the genocidal rule of Pol Pot and his adolescent crew of murderers. They were finally overthrown with the help of the newly formed Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
To those who can’t figure out what's happening now, or don’t want to: this is your doing. In spite of Saddam and the Baathist dictatorship, Iraq was a functioning country before the US wrecked it. Anyone who dissented was in deep trouble, but most people had jobs, homes, food, intact families. There was not open civil war between religious communities. Then the Bush/Cheney regime of war criminals and professional liars (with the consent of the Democrats) launched the invasion.
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