Not being snarky here, but the most distinctive feature (or bug!) to me in the Ramadi picture is the number of huge holes made by heavy weapons. Surely, that is not Hangzhou.

Hangzhou is the most beautiful city in China, too. If you do an image search, you’ll see the lovely areas — the tourist areas and the tea country nearby. It also has the ETDZ, which is filled with newly constructed buildings that look like standard Western construction (although they are not up to code — wiring catches fire, glass windows sometimes shatter when the winter wind blows, etc). There are also huge sections that look substantially worse than this, in spite of the absence of war and China pouring all the money it can into the city.

My point here has to do with third world conditions. Yes, the fighting hasn’t helped, except by giving Iraq a chance to rise out of the third world. Still, we know for example that Iraq’s electrical grid was on the point of collapse before the war, using generators that were so obsolete that we couldn’t order parts for them and had to machine subsitutes by hand until new generators could be purchased. Other infrastructure is likewise apt to have been neglected — as it was even in China, far richer than Iraq, even in Hangzhou, which is its most beautiful city, even without a war.

On another point, the place probably didn’t look like that when we got there, but we didn’t go there to blow the place to hell. Our enemies want the place blown to hell with continuing chaos so we’ll get sick of it and leave. It’s working, I guess. People have our MO down. From Reconstruction after our Civil War, all the way to now, if you stick with it long enough and don’t give up, the Americans will eventually get sick of it and leave. Tediously predictable.

I will take the Civil War and WWII as counterexamples that the American people will stick it out IF IT IS WORTH DOING. Turning Vietnam and Iraq into bastions of democracy? People aren’t that easy to fool.

Yeah, me too Commissar…

What is it that you are trying to say?
Ramadi is one of the central points of a war. The fact that buildings are in poor repair (almost rubble) says… what???
As others have said, you can go to other countries and find the same or worse conditions.
What is your point?

Well then, by all means, “please share your views with the rest of the class.”