Don, I do remember well how the USA let down the Shiite Muslims in Iraq whom it had encouraged to rise up against Saddam, yes. But I think they were so encouraged simply as a temporary strategem, to give Saddam more grief and make it harder for him to fight his war at the time.

So they were used and then abandoned. No new story there. An imperial power always uses disaffected sections of an enemy populace to fight the group who are in power there. It's standard military policy, and everyone's been doing it since the Romans and Greeks, if not long before.

For instance, in Vietnam the USA (and the French before them) used Catholic Christian Vietnamese against the Buddhist majority. They also used ethnic Montagnard tribesmen against the Vietnamese majority. It's the old "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" routine.

In what is now Mexico the Spanish once used a big confederacy of other Native tribes to fight the Aztecs...but the poor suckers who helped the Spanish destroy the Aztecs ended up enslaved and decimated by the Spaniards as soon as the Aztecs were gone.

But I suspect that's not the point you wish to drive at, right? ;-)

Well (shrug) the only thing that counts to me is that the USA should never have put its combat troops and its military bases anywhere in the Middle East in the first place, and I do not support an American occupation of either Iraq or Afghanistan upon any rationale.

Thus you and I will continue to disagree on this subject, and much bandwidth will be consumed. ;-) (unless I get smart and do something else with my time instead...)