Would vaccine mandates work for Germany?

The German government is contemplating enforced vaccination... a good idea?

Back in 2009 l did a year-long masters programme on Middle Eastern politics. For my dissertation I wrote about US counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq after the invasion in 2003.

I read the accounts of policy makers and soldiers, who described the cognitive dissonance that was taking place in Washington at the time.

The US military and its allies had arrived as liberators - armed with democracy and freedom - yet after only a few months of occupation a violent rebellion sprung up that seemed to grow in strength the more the US captured or killed its members.

For years after 2003, Washington policy makers were trapped in a form of self-deception. Convinced that they were bringing progress, they couldn’t understand why normal people were siding with the extremists and not with them.

This led to a zero-tolerance approach to dissent. Insurgents’ family members were detained as a means of coercion. Entire villages were encircled with barbed wire. The Marines’ counter-insurgency manual didn’t dist…