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MITCHELL, SD (Mitchell Now) America in the 21st century likes to talk about foreign intervention in the language of democracy, human rights, and stability.

But on the ground, the story often has a second, quieter engine: resources — oil, gas, strategic minerals, and the contracts and leverage that come with them. Even when motives are mixed, resource realities shape the outcome. And after spending time working in Iraq/Kurdistan and Afghanistan, I came to a blunt conclusion: we can remove a regime, we can fund programs, we can build paper institutions — but we can’t quickly create legitimacy, or rewire a system built around survival and extraction. The local lifers know we’re temporary. They behave accordingly. So do we.

Short-Timers

In Afghanistan, I was Nate from Landman — the attorney sent out to “make things happen” for people with more power than he has, trying to do his job in a world run by sharks. And as tough as Tommy Norris is on TV, the real lifers in the Afghan government were tougher, meaner, and shrewder — not because they were better educated, but because history and necessity had trained them to read power fast and survive it.

That’s the part most Americans miss. We rotate in and out on a schedule, counting tours and months and deliverables. The people who run these systems don’t think that way. They think in generations. They can wait you out. They can be polite, take the meeting, take the money, and outlast you without breaking a sweat.

Erbil: The Performance of Authority

Even when local professionals were impressive — and in some places they absolutely were — the clock was always ticking.

At the airport in Erbil, I watched a group of Kurdish lawyers in their twenties and thirties walk through the terminal dressed like the outward face of a new country: sharp suits, subdued ties, pointy dress shoes clicking across the tile. They looked like a society that had discovered money, ambition, and a future that could be negotiated — the new economic and political freedoms of post-Saddam Kurdistan made visible.

For a few hours, I was “in charge” of them. I never understood what they actually did. They were always polite. If they talked about me, it was in Kurdish. My job seemed to be to stand close enough that it looked like someone was managing them. So I pretended to manage, and they pretended to listen. We were courteous, professional, and mostly performing for the same invisible audience.

Then they disappeared back into their country, and I went back to mine. That was the arrangement in miniature: a temporary empire of checklists and manners, built on the assumption that none of this would last.

Kabul: The Toll-Booth State

If you want the smaller version of the same story, it fits inside a parking space in Kabul.

The war was still going on, but Kabul wasn’t under daily attack the way Americans imagine war zones — not most days. Mostly it was the grind, the checkpoints, the anxiety, and, once in a while, a stupid car bombing that reminded you the whole thing could tilt.

I wanted to go downtown after a tour of the city. My driver parked our white Toyota Camry along a street that looked like it belonged to someone else’s war. Across the road, a burly cop with one of the longest beards I’ve ever seen outside of ZZ Top motioned him over.

“Wait here,” my driver said.

He crossed the street. There was an animated conversation. My driver nodded, kept his face neutral, and then handed the cop something small. When he came back, I asked, “Everything OK?”

“Yes,” he said. “We just had to pay a small fee to park in the parking space.”

I gave him five dollars to cover it. Not because I liked it, but because I wanted the day to keep moving. It wasn’t like parking in downtown Sioux Falls. In Kabul, even the curb had a price, and everybody knew who collected it — from the street.

The Prize Under the Ground

And underneath it all sits the real prize: resources.

After Saddam, Iraq was and is a mess — not because Iraqis can’t govern themselves, but because removing a coercive order doesn’t automatically produce legitimacy. In fragmented, low-trust societies, power doesn’t vanish when a strongman falls. It reorganizes. Often, it reorganizes around money.

In Kurdistan, oil and gas revenue helped prop up a kind of stability — enough to build, enough to modernize, enough to create a professional class that looked like it belonged in a normal country. In Iraq more broadly, resource wealth fed politics, patronage, contracts, and in many cases, corruption.

Afghanistan had its own version of the same underlying story. As stupid as the Russians could be in Afghanistan, their geologists were great. I saw the maps. They had already mapped the locations of many strategic and rare minerals. The ground had value that outsiders understood long before ordinary Afghans could ever benefit from it.

But the hard part was never identifying the prize. The hard part was building the security, infrastructure, and legitimacy required to extract it, transport it, and keep it from turning into a war.

Easier said than done.

Venezuela Rhymes

Which brings us back to Venezuela.

Venezuela isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan. It doesn’t need to be for the pattern to rhyme.

Venezuela is a rentier state built on oil money — a country where whoever controls the rents controls the politics, the patronage, and the coercion. When the state is funded by a resource stream instead of a broad tax base, legitimacy gets thinner. Accountability gets weaker. The fight stops being about policy and becomes about control of the spigot.

So when the United States steps into a place like that — with a dramatic plan, a sense of righteousness, and a clock running in the background — it runs into the same physics it always runs into: short-timers meeting lifers. Outsiders making promises they can’t guarantee. Local power networks hedging, positioning, and waiting to see which flag is actually going to stick.

People who live through repeated regime changes don’t gamble on narratives. They gamble on survival. They learn to read power. They learn to wait.

The Hard Limit

We can topple a leader. We can disrupt a regime. What we can’t reliably do — not quickly, not cleanly, not on rotation schedules — is build legitimacy where legitimacy doesn’t exist, or build trust where the incentives reward extraction.

We can change the headline. We can’t change the operating system.

And if you’ve ever watched a man pay a parking “fee” with a straight face — as if it were weather — you know exactly how hard it is to rewrite that code.

Author’s note: I spent time working in Iraq/Kurdistan and Afghanistan and am drawing here on personal observation and later reporting.