As a present alpha nation, we forget what it used to be like when we were a beta nation. And more importantly what its like to be an always beta nation. But there are certain countries, due to location, that are always political footballs. To a certain extent Vietnam was one such nation as is Finland where some of my ancestor came from. But as you view the long history of these football nations, at a certain point in time, the regional super power, be it Russia or China in the cited cases, hits an expansionist phase and gobbles up its neighbors. And then tries to impose its culture on the vanquished which goes over like a lead balloon. Even though military resistance is futile, these football nations retain their own identities by resisting by largely mental means. And then the Alpha nation finally gets exhausted trying to govern those that hate it and give up what they had. The football nation then has some period of independence and that is then followed by being gobbled up again.
The point is that these cyclic swings often take hundreds of years and Iraq is just starting year five. In the larger Muslim Christian battles, the more numerous and now technologically superior Christians have been kicking military butt for something on the order of 500 years. But from the Islamic point of view, the Christians are still the same morally bankrupt louts that came in the crusades. And if you also look at their long history, what the gains the Christians win they can seldom hold because they will resisted for however long it takes. And in Islamic history, that resistance often takes 150 years to bear fruit. For them its somewhat of an expected norm.
In the modern world, can we assume that there will be only one 911 as we try to break the will of the opposition? And can you break the will of the opposition at the point of a gun?
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