Quote Originally Posted by Sargent View Post
Bottom line, just breaking a thing -- the proposed military strategy to which my comment was originally directed -- is a bad idea. Powell was wise to promulgate the Humpty Dumpty Doctrine, and it's only hubris that fuels the notion that the Incredible Hulk Doctrine can succeed.
The Humpty Dumpty Doctrine assumes what has yet to be demonstrated: the capacity to fix. Very simply, we don't have it. We're good at the Incredible Hulk stuff: we have armed forces and they know how to break things. We have no organized entity trained and equipped to repair nations. What we've done is to deploy forces that are trained and equipped to break things and asked them to do what they are not trained and equipped to do. Not surprisingly, we haven't fixed much and we've exposed ourselves to a war of attrition, our single greatest vulnerability. This is not smart.

Iraq and Afghanistan were arguably broken before we ever went there. A reasonable goal might have been to neither break further nor to attempt to fix, but simply to demonstrate to the inmates that while we've no concern with their domestic issues, attacking us or our allies, or sheltering those who do, will provoke highly undesirable consequences. That we could have done. Letting the mission creep from there to the appalling construct of "nation-building" was a spectacularly costly mistake.