That's exactly the problem the U.S. has. As long as they find a single idiot willing to defend the status quo they won't do anything. Fact is, the amount of casualties in the U.S. from shootings would qualify any middle eastern state for some sweet democracy.
The 'democracy in middle east' is a meme. United States is incapable of maintaining occupations primarily due to its own values. this is why after World War II we forced the colonial powers to decolonize (case in point, Suez Canal conflict where we forced UK and France to back off). America just doesn't know how to maintain an occupation, because to maintain an occupation requires you to have extremely brutal power structure on the civilian population, and if our military was trained to do that then they would wreak havoc in our own countries. So we train our military according to our values which renders them incapable of being able to maintain an occupation the way Chinese army or Russian army would be able to do.
You seem to ignore that the US has had, and kept, several overseas territories. There are current movements to recoup the independence of several of such territories, like Hawaii.
> So we train our military according to our values which renders them incapable of being able to maintain an occupation the way Chinese army or Russian army would be able to do.
The US military has been involved in all sorts of atrocities since the end of WWII, they just sometimes failed at achieving their military goals, e.g. Vietnam, and sometimes the government resorted to the use of other aggression tools, e.g. Cuba economic blockade.
Being able to maintain an occupation seems highly determined by the local population will and ability to fight. In the 1980's the Russian army tried to occupy Afghanistan and the Chinese army tried to march into Vietnam. Both had extremely brutal power structure on the civilian population, and both took severe damage then left.
