When I was serving in Vietnam, my buddies and I would speculate on how to end the war. One of the more interesting suggestions was to cover the entire country of Vietnam (both North and South) in a couple of feet of asphalt and turn it into a parking lot for China.

What we thought would happen, happened. We predicted that President (Tricky Dick) Nixon would declare that he had won, and would then pull out all American troops. The puppet government that the U.S. had set up would collapse for lack of popular support (or even interest), and the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army would more or less walk in and take over the country. In the end, he did, and they did.

Now that Obama has announced that the majority of American troops would be withdrawn from Iraq, reports are filtering out of the country that the “insurgents” (if a foreign government had invaded the U.S., we would declare that American soldiers who were fighting to drive them out to be patriots) are laying low until the U.S. leaves, then they will really get to work dividing up the country. Why is anyone surprised by this? From the beginning, the war in Iraq has been a first cousin to the American war in Vietnam.

(And, by the way, I know that the original native fighters gave way to outside fighters several years ago. These are guys who have come from other Muslim countries to fight the American devil because they have nothing better to do back home.)

Now the new administration wants to change the nature of the war in Afghanistan, but the original goals of the war (defeating the Taliban and establishing a central government) remain unchanged. The U.S. and its allies had all but won the war before Bush, in yet another ill-advised move, pulled out the troops to invade Iraq.

When will we learn? When will we learn that attempting to impose western ideals on non-western nations does not work?