Quote Originally Posted by Bill Moore View Post
I believe the American people have a strong sense of right and wrong, which is a large part of what makes me proud to be an American. The downside to this (and I have definitely been guilty of this) is they feel compelled to act when they see an injustice in the world, but they have no idea where that act will take them or the millions of people impacted by it. We collectively have naive beliefs about how the world works, and then when we find out that can't save all the children or send all the girls to school despite our best efforts, and we get tired of our people coming home in coffins or terribly maimed with no end in sight we abandon altrustic goals for more reasonable ones. The question we need to ask in the beginning before we commit is will we ultimately do more good, or create a worse situation like we did in Iraq where more people died after Saddam was soundly defeated?
I think the sense of right and wrong is only part of the problem. All too often our foreign policy goals are built more around what politicians think will be salable to the home front audience than around what is realistic and pragmatic in the environments where we operate. It's easier to sell armed intervention to the populace with a promise that we're there to "install" democracy, defend human rights, and serve all those other lovely lofty goals that Americans love to hear in a sound bite. The problem is that when the sound bite is history, the domestic audience that bought the sound bite has to confront the reality that any attempt to actually do these things is almost certain to bog down in an interminable morass of lost lives and gargantuan expenditures.

At some point we need to accept reality: we can't "fix" other nations. That's not about military power: even were our military twice as powerful as it is now, we still couldn't use it to "fix" other nations. Trying to use military force to "fix" someone else's nation - meaning to impose our own ideas of how that nation ought to be managed - is a one-way road to failure that shouldn't be embarked upon in the first place.