Role Reversal

When my daughter was young and disagreed on what she should be allowed to do, we often did a role reversal. She would become the slightly overprotective mother while I would be the recalcitrant teenager. If we didn't dissolve into giggles at our acting antics, we usually came out with a workable compromise and went on to share some gooey dessert. Many temper tantrums and angry moments were sidetracked and our lives ran more smoothly.
I wish Americans could pretend they were in the Iraqis' place, only not in Fallujah, but in our own homes. Imagine that the Moslem world, convinced of western godlessness, decided to take over the US to make it an Islamic heaven. Successfully they bomb us into submission, destroying our major cities, leaving millions without water or electricity. Our military is disbanded and our weapons of mass destruction, which were quickly found, were destroyed.
I will call the people who took over America "liberators" because they think they have "liberated" us from our evil ways. Any American who resists the liberators will be called an "insurgent".
To stop our "uncontrolled materialism" the liberators of the US closed all our shopping malls and sent much of the goods back to their own countries. Corporation heads were replaced with religious leaders. Our Army and all our law enforcement agencies were disbanded, although some American joined the new Moslem Army and new Moslem police forces. Unemployment was running at 67%. Any reconstruction projects done were by citizens of the liberating countries so any chance for work was further reduced.
The new Ayatollah, in charge of the American government, was an American Moslem appointed by the liberators, although we were told we could appoint our own religious leaders in the future, but then they would set up a government based on Koran. Over and over the Americans were told to put aside their "new" culture of only a couple of hundred years and accept the much older culture created by the Koran. Because of its longevity, Americans were told that it had to be superior to the upstart idea of secular democracy, free trade and capitalism.
Certain cities, of course, rebelled, and New York, Washington DC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, and Miami were bombed into rubble to route out the insurgents.
Several churches were turned into prisons, when although abundant in number local prisons overflowed with people who fought against the liberators. Reports came out of American insurgents being tortured. People were snatched from their homes in the middle of the night and tortured. Many were shot outright if they tried to protect their families. Almost no household was left without losing a relative to the liberators.
Now, as an American, would you embrace the new leaders, thanking them for saving us from our decadent lifestyle and repressive leaders? Would you immediately embrace the new values that you had been denied because of our previous evil leadership? Or would you join the insurgency? If you did join the insurgency would you think of yourself as insurgent or as an American patriot fighting to resist invaders?
Let's stop pretending now. Hopefully we have been able to put ourselves in the Iraqis' place and see why they may not be co-operating, and why the insurgency is growing. Anyone familiar with the Arab world knows that Iraqis have been the strongest fighters of the Middle East throughout history. They have been invaded before, but no invasion had ever been successful and this one will fail at a terrible cost to both Americans and Iraqis.