one hot mess

The guerrilla war is fought by the home country who has the weaker force and dares not attempt a set battle, but who has the advantage of being able to live off the land and to blend in with the populace when not at war.  You can sort of win a war that way.  You don't have the big battle and the ceremony of signing a paper, but the big power just decides the whole thing is not worth the big fight it will take for a victory and declares victory and pulls out.  I don't believe that we signed a piece of paper with the British until like ten years later.  Texas and Mexico never did sign a paper.  Well the US probably made them sign something after Texas was part of the US and we had beaten the Mexicans in that odd little war that ended up with us bringing the US to the Mexicans, rather than the Mexicans bringing themselves to the US, as they do now.

War between nations is somewhat tidy.  One side wins, the other loses.  Some kind of treaty is signed and things go on.  Guerrilla wars are messier.  The guerrillas can call it a victory when the occupying power pulls out, but the guerrillas can always come back from a defeat and resume it whenever they want. The war on terror is even messier because what does it even mean?

You talk about the jihadists (There has been some controversy about what to call them.  The republicans want to call them Islamist terrorists or radicals while the dems don't like that because when you put Islamist in there it sounds like this is a war against Islam, and we want a lot of Islamists to be on our side, so I am going to go with jihadists since I am a dem) not having a goal, what about us, what is our goal in this hot mess?

You know the Islamists never really did have countries like we do in the west.  They were more like Europe in the middle ages before modern nation states came into existence.  They didn't get nations until we colonized them and cut them up into these weird nations to suit the occupying forces.  Sometimes we in the west get the blame for the hot mess because we did that carving, but really, after a hundred years haven't they had time to rearrange themselves?

Myself i think it would be a good idea to recarve the area, to have Shiite countries and Sunni countries and Kurdistan, but I don't know how that would happen.

How did we get into this hot mess?  I guess it begins with Israel and oil.  We started meddling with them to get our way on these issues, and along the way we cozied up to some of the countries, most notably Saudi Arabia.  Al Qaeda began with trying to overthrow the Saudi government to get our forces out of there and then they went into Afghanistan, and then 911, and then we toppled the odious but somewhat stable Iraqi government and all hell broke loose.

When i first started subbing I thought it would be me vs the kids, which would be tough but something to deal with it, but then it turned out that the kids were also fighting among themselves, and that made it even tougher.

I don't know, it's one hot mess.