Obviously it doesn't work that way in the long run. If the coexistence that you posit occurs it become Byzantium and the Eastern Roman empire.
When the participants are similar enough to not exterminate each other, there is no evil or good it becomes a merging of two (or more) cultures.
I don't want the risk, nor do I expect us to be permanent in Iraq but if that happened the country and culture that would emerge in 50 years would be different from anything currently in the middle east and it could conceivably be a good thing. We left our mark on Japan and S. Korea and imo the world is better for it.
The body count has been too high, the financial drain too costly and the politics too intense to salvage much from the Iraqi situation but I do believe that had we not mucked it up, the result might have been what I hoped for at the outset, a moderate, mostly secular, democratic state, that would lead the rest of the region into the future.
Flame » in reply to You can read it. Through a glass, darkly.
how can an entire country, or alliance be "right", and their opponents all be "wrong"
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- Clash of Cultures