Afghanistan has been a good theatre for us.
First, we used it to crumble the evil empire and all it cost us at the time was some lars rockets and olympic medals.
More recently, we managed to overthrow the Taliban and reimplement the more historic strongman form of government - taking care to tinker with the balance between the various factions. Okay, we actually won that war before it even started by getting Musharef to side with us and hooking up with the local militia. Because the presence of American troops was minimal we did it without causing an undue resentment of American power. I think the fact that we have any semblance of goodwill left in a country we just blew the bejeevers out of, has to say that the strategy was pretty damn effective.
I know from your writings, that you consider the Afghan war to be a failure. But I think the real problem with Afghanistan is that we were too dang successful. So successful in fact that we think that we can get a repeat performance in Iraq, with very little blood loss (at least from our side) and the people will love us for it. Also in our rush, we've probably opened the backdoor again for Afghanistan to return to it's state of Wild-Wild-West (or is that East).
I think that one thing that people don't consider is that it really may not make a difference whether the Iraqi people hate Saddam. Even if we rid them of the evil dictator and they gain more freedom, it does not necessarily translate into goodwill. Those in the opposition may find us temporarily useful, but they will unlikely acknowledge any sacrifice in their quest - perceiving historical entanglements and self financial intents.
