Quote Originally Posted by JMA View Post
The "OK so we screwed it all up but are still going to walk away" people are from this everything is negotiable mindset I speak about. Not nice people. While I am not surprised the Arabs are taking to the street to bring about change I remain amazed the US people are not taking to the streets.
The US certainly has its share of responsibility for screwing things up, but we aren't the only ones by any means. The idea that the US can somehow "fix" any of this seems to me extremely unlikely: our attempts to "help" in the past (like our noble crusade to save the world from Communism) often managed to make things a good deal worse.

I don't see any great enthusiasm among the places we screwed up for salvation coming form the US (I live in a place where the US screwed up royally). For the most part people would rather see us stay away, for excellent reasons: they haven't had great experiences with US intervention.

Have you noticed that East Asia and Latin America, both of which saw more than their share of American screwups, managed to put themselves in much better order once the US backed off and stopped messing around in their internal affairs?

The solution to the problems created by to dumb intervention isn't smart intervention: intervention that seems smart today often seems excruciatingly stupid tomorrow (the "Kirkpatrick doctrine" is a classic example). The answer to the problems created by dumb intervention is less intervention, IMO.

Do you see any evidence that the world at large wants the US - or anyone - to put on a superhero suit and go charging around trying to solve everybody else's problems, even the problems it had a role in creating?