Reply #42: What you say is true about the US's actions,

[RafterMan]

but this is not a useful model for the insurgency in Iraq. If it were, the violence would be country wide -- instead, it is centered around those who have most to lose under *any* change in government, not just a switch to an American puppet state.

You implicitly admit this with your solution -- if Americanization were the sole cause of the insurgency, then the solution would be to have the Americans leave. Once they were gone, the cause would be removed and there would be no need for foreign troops of any stripe. But there is, you admit, a need for foreign troops. And I say the groups that cause that need would use the same methods against the new occupiers that they did against the Americans, with the same success.