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.
Bookmarks