Source: Have personally eaten well off the food that american troops abandon when they move positions and can't be bothered to take it with them.

A more realistic cope would be "their logistics are so good that they just leave food lying around and you could feed a small force just with scavenging and a large one with captured material".

Anyway, if you want to be disgusted by the pathetic whining of one of the most repulsive war criminals to ever write a book, I'd highly recommend The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien.

If I haven't missed something then they're taking their sweet time about it.

This sounds awful, I hope you recover soon

Westerners homogenize non-Western cultures and cast them as either "benevolent" or "evil".

When discussing these cultures, the reality of life for any non-Western person is not centered at all. Westerners are performing for each other, showing off how knowledgeable and cultured thery are.

And if we insist on pretending that these societies are utopias because we wouldn't support revolutions within them otherwise, then we a) give our enemies an extremely easy and effective rhetorical tool to use against us, and b) look like absolute tools ourselves.

One particular thing I see a lot is the belief that patriarchy has been fixed because the women's militias exist, when the women's militias explicitly exist because patriarchy has not been fixed.

Are Americans in general aware that their government lost the war on terror?

I genuinely believe there is a plan and a purpose to all of this, but I can't for the life of me imagine what it is.

There are costs, obviously, but they're far less than the cost of locking yourself into a rigid system and being unable to change mistakes, or of never implementing anything because it isn't perfect yet, or of refusing to listen and respond to criticism.