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Notes -
It took 14 years, a massive refugee crisis to Europe, the destruction of the country and a decimation of the Christian population to get a jihadist dictator that somewhat controls the country. The ambition is not what it was in 2003.
Kind of clashes with the American rhetoric of unprovoked invasions and the horrors of Russian aggression in Ukriane.
The Christian population of the Middle East has been leaving since the late years of the Ottoman Empire, a process that has only accelerated since the rise of Islamism post-Qutb after the middle of the 20th century and especially since 1979.
The War on Terror was the death knell for ‘humanitarian’ US regime change opps because it was the moment it became clear that the State Dept, CIA and DoD no longer had the appetite for actual population transformation. There were people who pushed for it. Ann Coulter after 9/11: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity”. But when it came to it, nobody had the guts to do it and it seemed like a lot of work when you could get some peace corps Yale grads at State to fund a few schools to teach women how to sew, fund girls sports teams, give the top ten high school students in the country scholarships to Georgetown and call it a day.
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