mhoyeDuring the first few weeks of Operation Desert Storm we'd routinely see footage of entire battalions of Iraqi soldiers walking up to the first American GI they could find waving white flags, believing that the worst thing that could happen to them at the hands of the American military was a shower, an MRE and a pack of cigarettes. The mythos of America as just actor was largely intact then, and that mythos saved a lot of American lives. And then Abu Grahib happened, and that all ended.
Suddenly the prospect of surrendering yourself to American custody meant maybe getting tortured to death and maybe getting sexually humiliated as part of the process; everyone saw it was better to die fighting. In days the entire tide of that conflict in that whole region changed; there was no recovering from it.
We're looking at the long unwinding of that story here today, everywhere. Nobody can or will believe in Americans, or even the idea of America, again. That's over now.