How did General Patton put it? “Fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of mankind.” Something like that, anyway.
The U.S. should get every last person out and set remote-controlled bombs all over it, blowing it as soon as either ISIS or Iran’s forces surround it, in order to deprive our successors from using it. We should, of course, put up signs in Arabic and Farsi saying it’s booby-trapped so they don’t go in before it blows…a last departing gesture from the civilized world.
Just ruminating a bit. Before the colonial era, most of the world was ravaged and ruled by wild tribes having little regard for either humanity or objective morality. Colonialism damped that down for a considerable period in many places. But due to the arming of the tribesmen and the unwillingness of colonial powers to stay with the effort, the wild tribes are surging back.
America was not really a colonialist power. We got nothing out of our intervention in Iraq or Afghanistan, but we were able to keep peace and quell the savagery to the extent we were willing to do it. I remember, as a kid, thinking Vietnam to be the “last colonial war”, in effect, if not in the full panoply of objectives. But we didn’t sustain it, and the savages took over. I will never see what the ultimate result will be, but someday my descendants will. Hopefully it will be less savage, but it might not be. I was wrong, though. Vietnam was not the winding up of western civilization’s inroads into the world of savagery. Looks like the Middle East will be.
It appears too that the “dark empires” of the world are in for a resurgence; the Persian Empire, the Caliphate, the Russian Empire, the Chinese Empire, undoubtedly others, who don’t mind, and perhaps even enjoy, decimating the opposition with utter ruthlessness.
Those places were better off under western colonialism. The world was.
The question now is whether western civilization can save itself. The roles played by Sobieski before the gates of Vienna, Polish cavalrymen blocking Tukhachevsky, and that of Don Juan of Austria at Lepanto, are now different. But the basic situation is the same. The west is in full retreat and the enemies of civilization intend to attack.