Well for what it's worth the Invasion of Iraq was a giant success. The decade trying to rebuild with an incompetent new government, army, and suicide bombers who wanted to make everyone's life hell, however, was a failure.
Makes me wonder what we did in Japan that was so different and yet so much more successful. During the war people were so fearful of the US in Okinawa that tens of thousands committed mass suicide. Maybe it's because Japan isn't filled with a bunch of groups that hate each other, but at the same time we stopped the Euros from killing each other every 5 minutes. So nation building has worked before. If the military leaders were more competent on a plan to fix things post-war then getting involved wouldn't be such a big deal. But they're not.
The difference was that Japan was united mostly homogeneous people - the Ainu aside - with an intact leadership structure/figure head that could be coopted even as the "noble class" was disinfranchised and replaced. The Japanese also had a "collective spirit" beat into them by a millenia+ of shoguns, where any individualists who weren't members of the nobility either managed to leave or got darwined out one way or another. The Japanes also had functioning bureaucracy and....when I say it was "technical based" I don't mean so much in terms of skill but in that while you could pick and chose your favorites in the bureaucracy and move them around, you couldn't just have your cousin promoted to province administration.
And Germany was populated by Germans.
Contrasted with Iraq, which was an artifical entity created by the british & french in the engineered collapse of the Ottoman Empirein 1918. Iraq should have been three countries, but the planers wanted to create one country that had the possibility of wealth instead of three tribal backwaters. What ended up happening was the Sunni minority took control and brutally suppressed the Shia majority and the Kurdish minority. When leadership collapsed, conflict was inevitable. You can even look at the map of unrest: for some unknown reason, the Kurdish areas didn't see much in the way of terrorism despite the area being a famously violent area for Saddam's troops. (Because "Being left alone" is what the Kurds want and they finally got it). And the South - initial demonstrations aside - was pretty calm until Iran was able to work its magic, and even then you see most of the danger being close the Iran border and/or border with the Sunni areas.
The Iraqis didn't mind the US, they minded that the US was stopping them from ethnically purging those other, bad arabs.
The violence was all Sunnis fearful of the Shia doing to them what they'd been doing to the Shia for the past half century.
Iraq was corrupt & tribal as hell with no functioning Bureaucracy, just a group of family & patronage appointments.
It was a no-win situation where if Dubya had done the sensible thing and divided the country, you'd basically be handing the southern port of the country to Iran. Instead he allowed Obama to hand the middle of the country over to ISIS
Also Iraqis have a long history of being unrealiable and utter pieces of shit. They got their chief pedo's grandson killed by promising to help him overthrow the Caliph Yazid, but then turned little chicken shit bitches when it was time to actually go through with it, resulting in Husayn dying outnumbered and dehydrated in the desert.
For starters Arabs and Muslims in general are racially inferior.
QFT.
IDK what their motives were for working with the US in the aftermath of the bombs but they ended up loving MacArthur and he was an ideal fit for shaping what their society would become, I think he understood them incredibly well and he was able to have a semi-functional relationship with them at the time. That, along with the fact that they had a desire to rebuild for the sake of the survivors, put them on track to doing well after World War 2.
They loved MacArthur for mainly two reasons:
Firstly, he didn't do anything disgraceful to the Emperor, other than making him subordinate to Gaijin and speak with them directly.
Secondly, he over threw
the slant jews the Zaibatsu- the family owned business/industrial conglomerates that the wealthy elite used to lock up the country's wealth - and distributed the power and wealth to the common folk.
Other than making them give women some rights, he didn't really mandate many changes in Japanese society and fixed most of the things that were "wrong" with it.
The closest I can come to trying to explain this is imagine if Martians invaded the US and instead of the genocide Topps tried to tell us was coming, instead they kept the president and the Supreme Court, but cleared out congress & threw half of them in jail for all the scummy shit they got up to. Immediately after that, they went and shut down wallstreet, forcing every CEO to forfeit 80% of salary while raiding the bank accounts of the New England 'old money' and did the same to Hollywood next, using the money to rebuild the country & its industrial base with Martian Super Technology.
In addition, because the Martians were afraid the Venusians might try to over throw the country, they brought in weird martian future tech to give us all jobs. And once the whole deal was said and done, the only thing we it cost us was we had to let them a section of Florida for a rocket base - which is a boom town because of all the money the Martians stationed there keep spending.
Plus MacArthur had charisma for a pump stat, and if he hadn't been in Korea at the time and gotten before congress in time, The Korea war would have resulted in China being de-commied
and russia getting an over due tactical nuking.
Its the same reasons while Iraqis who were old enough during the Invasion still fondly remember Paul Bremer even if they hated American Troops. Because he actually did things that were good for the country and its people, and not just the elite. Bremer could have run for President of Iraq and won.
The thing about the Middle East is that they never settled those tribal conflicts. Even the royal house of Saudi Arabia is on shakier legs then anyone wants to admit because those of tribal rivalries. When you put that in the mix along with the dysfunctional nature of Islam, how it splits people apart, creates societies where there's only tyranny, and their best successes are only achieved after desperately aping better races and nations, then you get the failure of the Iraq War. A lot of people thought that the Iraq War would be like World War 2, that there would be a dedicated chunk of Iraqis that wanted to build a nation as Westerners understand it. But they don't want that, they are inbred pedophiles and wanna-be warlords with iphones. They don't understand what a nation-state is or how to build a working country that can have things like running water or working supply lines.
Nation building works when the people of that nation understand what a state actually is and when they want a civil society. Japan wanted that. Arabs and Muslims are incapable of it without having a warlord sitting on them with a gun pointed at the back of their heads at all times, knowing that if they break the law then they will be tortured and murdered. That's the only thing that keeps them in line. With Japan, no one had to do that.
You can blame the Ottomans & The Pedophile Muhammed (pbuh) for the Arab attitude. See, everyone knew Arabs were worhtless and shiftless. That is why the Pedophile Muhammed (pbuh) left cities intact in exchange for tribute - why rule a place when you can just get the taxes? Muhammed just had the perfect timing where he let stronger, better-run empires beat the shit of each other, and then swooped in to take their shit and coopt their administrators.
The Ottomans came to the horrible realization that they were Turks but Turks are also Arabs and therefore worthless. So they demanded their Eastern European and Caucus territories provide them with slaves; prepubescent boys they took from their families, converted to Islam, brainwashed, and then turned over the running of the Empire over to them.
But yes, the Iraqis are members of tribes, not nations, and that is why the only way there is world peace is if we glass the middle east.[/quote][/QUOTE]