Legion Troll
A fine upstanding poster
Over the past four decades, America has bombed pharmaceutical plants in Sudan and cars from Yemen to Afghanistan.
It has promoted democracy in the Palestinian territories, then subterfuge and civil war in Syria.
In Iraq alone, it has tried war, sanctions, no-fly zones, shock-and-awe, regime change, withdrawal, and, now, bombing again.
our long war in trying to shape the Middle East was precipitated by the oil shocks of the '70s, the Iranian Revolution, and the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan.
President Jimmy Carter, looking at Soviet power just a few hundred miles from the Strait of Hormuz, announced that "an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."
Perhaps more darkly, this war has been impelled by a concept of freedom that has gripped American thought, one that identifies America's existence almost exclusively with power, riches, and consumption.
America's elite have tried to "shape" parts of the Islamic world according to American notions. American policy is made by leaders who share a view that history has an ineluctable direction, toward American-style freedom and managed market economies, who believe that America's system of meritocracy and America's preeminent military power empower them with the wisdom and wherewithal to shape events on a global scale.
And perhaps most fatally:
A final assumption counts on the inevitability of America's purposes ultimately winning acceptance, even in the Islamic world. The subjects of U.S. benefactions will then obligingly submit to Washington's requirements and warmly embrace American norms. If not today, then surely tomorrow, the United States will receive the plaudits and be granted the honors that liberators rightly deserve. Near-term disappointments can be discounted given the certainty that better outcomes lie just ahead.
The word for this is hubris. And hubris, along with a cultivated lack of America's sustained public interest in this ongoing conflict, has led to chaos and indecision.
In contrast to the victory and unconditional surrender effected by WWII, or the long-term effect of the Cold War military buildup that kept the Soviet Union contained, the U.S. has tried multiple military strategies in the Middle East, most without a rational basis.
In the War for the Greater Middle East, the United States chose neither to contain nor to crush, instead charting a course midway in between. In effect, it chose aggravation. With politicians and generals too quick to declare victory and with the American public too quick to throw their hands up when faced with adversity, U.S. forces rarely stayed long enough to finish the job.
Instead of intimidating, U.S. military efforts have annoyed, incited, and generally communicated a lack of both competence and determination.
http://theweek.com/articles/617673/how-america-waged-eternal-war-middle-east
