What do Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and all other countries that we've bombed all have in common?

The answer is that they'll all be fine in twenty years. Let me clarify what I mean by this. I don't mean that they'll be economically recovered. I don't mean that they won't have lost hundreds of thousands of people. I don't mean any of that. I mean that they'll have secured the existence of their people and a future for their children. The little things like individual lives and luxuries will be gone, but they aren't in danger of losing the things that really matter.

They'll be fine as we either run out of money to fund our military activity or once the boomers die and nobody votes for war anymore. They can all think to themselves: "We'll be okay once the Americans leave, maybe not me personally, but We will be." And they can know for certain that the US will leave. Will it be in five years? Ten? Twenty? I don't know, but we'll be gone soon enough. In the eyes of history, a few decades isn't an especially long time.

If we really wanted to win this war, we wouldn't be relying so much on our military. You know what we'd do? We'd be taking millions of ordinary American families and giving them incentives to go live in and develop these middle eastern nations. We'd build schools, wholesome communities, a police force, have kids, and so on. When would we leave? Never. That's how you win a war. Have you ever heard the meme "If not for X, we'd all be speaking German right now?" This is the type of thought behind that meme. Sometimes you can change demographics with things like genocide or forcing them off their land, but you need to change the demographics.

This is also why Mexico's mass immigration is an act of war. We don't have the luxury that the Syrians have of knowing that what really matters will be safe in America. We are not faced merely with loss of luxury, economy, infrastructure, slight underpopulation or whatever. We cannot think to ourselves that things will probably be okay after a few decades. Our worries are the big things, like the existence of our people and a future for our children, and that's because what we're facing is the fundamental essence of war: demographic change. Military activity is part of most wars, but it's not what war is about. War is about demographic change.