Love Story (1991)

Click on this "full page" cartoon to open a larger, more readable version.

I had a British friend who once told me that I couldn't understand the Middle East because I'd grown up speaking American English rather than British English. Bombings and terror attacks in Ireland, he explained, were called the Irish "troubles".
Troubles means suffering, pain, tears, stuff like that. The word "problem" (an American favorite) implies that there is a "solution".

So the naive American approach of assuming that there's a "problem" in the Middle East whose "solution" can be scripted, just doesn't work.
Sometimes you can't just write a happy ending.
And that's what this cartoon from 1991 is all about.

* - * - *Fast forwarding to the 21st century, when similarly naive Americans liberated Iraq... they expected that the Iraqis would rush out of their homes, set up local chapters of the League of Women Voters, and embrace Western democracy in a grand Hollywood ending to that tragedy.

If only it had been so.