Nobody can possibly deny that there was a STUPENDOUS failure in 2003 with Iraq - the largest failure in US history. AND, our system is one of democracy.
The Iraq war decision shows an amazing weakness in our system - a hole so large that ignoring it is not an option.
Today, we’re moving in the precise WRONG direction, with constant assaults on legitimate news and an ever more closed government (our military action in places like Africa, for example).
We’re doing LESS to publicly think through policy than we have since Vietnam. In fact, we aren’t even asking policy questions anymore.
When was the last time there has been a serious foreign policy discussion on any of the places of current or recent combat?
Democracy FAILS when kept in the dark.
And, WE are in the dark - being kept their with total purposefulness.
Your first sentence assumes that the military owns the Department of State. That is what Bush did when he removed all post-war planning from Colin Powell and gave it to the military - which was totally unprepared to answer the questions of a post war Iraq while so busily “winning” the war.
The ultimate failure in Iraq was that we had NO lasting objectives that we cared about enough to actually think about.
Thus, the military kicked off the “post war” with “deBaathification” - a war on Sunnis that left them desperate for survival, and a direction that led to the civil war that continues through today. A civil war that aligns Iraq with Iran.
Suggesting this was THEIR failure is pure denialism.
And, we long ago learned that you don’t establish lasting systems by shooting people. Ask the Vietnamese, where I could book a vacation 10 years after they chased us away, ending our massive slaughter in their country.
LOL. The John Wayne version of history is pretty resistant to reality.
Fwiw - and as best I understand - the Cold War was a US success, though the Marshall Plan was founded more a need to find markets for post-war excess production. Europe was obvs bombed to buggery with little industry, hundred million potential consumers, so presented a perfect opportunity for Keynesian theory.
That’s largely fed by history - the US has so often actually been the Good Guys that it can be very hard to accept that there have been times when it has not.
From the Philippines 120 years ago, through Latin America, through north Africa, Asia and - still - the middle east, the world thanks you for supressing democracy everywhere.
I don’t see anything that we’ve done in the ME since the year 2000 as being successful - Afg, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan. Our Libya adventure was a fiasco. In Egypt we failed to even notice that a revolution was building against the government we worked to keep in power there, and ended up finding ourselves aligned with the anti-revolutionists who lost for good solid reasons. In fact, we bit so hard that ideas identified with the US were rejected purely on the grounds that they look like ours.
We’ve made zero effective attempts to resolve the Israel/Palestine problem - without us even attempting to end the Israeli war on Gaza that has been continuing for over a decade now. The Bush “roadmap” process failed to get Israel to even PAUSE their land theft and ethnic cleansing that they demanded to be able to continue during “negotiations”. And, we’ve seen nothing since. Plus, we continue funding and politically supporting their continued ethnic cleansing operations - even as every other nation in the entire world sees that as fundamentally illegal, immoral and unacceptable.
Iran has been a limited success - limited by the fact that US leadership now wants to give up inspections and has no possibility of forming effective sanctions.
We’re weaker in SE Asia, as China takes over shipping security. “Little rocket man” laughs at us from China while building more reactors.
We’re retracting into a shell of trade sanctions as we allow other nations to form a Pacific Trade alliance without us.
Claiming “good guy” kudos given the above seems like opening us up to a global belly laugh in our collective faces.
It is interesting observing the USA from outside; you see stuff -even relatively recently - like a US President chiding China over human rights. This can only feed into a pre-existing, domestic narrative - it’s simple propaganda for people content to be willfully blinkered.
Guantanamo, black op sites, institutional torture, Abu Graib, drone executions, etc, etc, and here’s the US President pretending the USA has the moral high ground. The whole world absolutely rolls in the aisles at this stuff yet it still plays at home.
For human rights, you can absolutely also read foreign policy - the ‘good guys’ narrative has everyone outside the US on the floor.
I think that before the Iraq war I naively believed that we had a fairly professional and sophisticated media apparatus. Sure, there was Fox News but everyone knew it was biased. I underestimated how unprofessional and downright biased the media are in general, and I’m not referring to a liberal bias. Save public television and radio, American media are nothing more than channels of infotainment and most Americans are just not going to get a full appraisal of current affairs by relying on the “news”
I agree with this. From the NY Times’ role in selling the war, to CNN’s ratings boner for a chance to televise it, the media just wasn’t skeptical. There were huge protests to the war and the media covered it like a fringe movement. Meanwhile, people who predicted pretty accurately the fallout of the invasion of Iraq were treated like kooks and those who sold the war still have their careers selling bullshit. We learned nothing.
Are you trying to make a case that China’s human rights record is better? If so, you might want to consider that your list isn’t even the worst things China has done this year, let alone a cherry picked one where you have to go ‘etc, etc’ and list things over a decade or more ago.
