Who broke Iraq? Was it Bush the elder who authorized the initial invasion or perhaps Madeline Albright who convinced the Iraqis that the US had no interest in what they did to Kuwait?

Perhaps it was Bush the younger after Saddam failed to live up to the armistice from the first gulf War and started using chemical weapons on the Kurds and violating no fly zones because the Euroweenies told him he was safe, because the US couldn’t possibly fight a war in Afghanistan and Iraq at the same time?

Maybe it was Obama who killed Gaddafi, and then destabilized the entire Middle East by beating a hasty and ill advised retreat from Iraq, breaking every promise America had made to the new government? In the process flooding the EU with criminal gangs of tribal refugees from one of the least literate places on the planet?
How about Saddam himself who was feeding his political foes and their families into wood chippers feet first and running rape rooms full of 12 year old school girls at the palace?

If we are assigning blame here, there is a lot to go around

We burned Japan to the ground. Pottery barn rule apply there? Or did they have it coming?

Should all these leaders be personally liable or should the American tax payers be on the hook yet again for decisions they really had nothing to do with?

Maybe we should just throw money at these countries so it could circulate back around as graft, 90 percent of which will end up in the pockets of current members of government and their useless children? I realize a big part of it will just fund terrorism against the west, but there should be plenty left over for Biden sticky fingers.

Please discuss why or why not this smarmy kindergarten concept should dictate US foreign policy?

Boy, the only person who comes off blameless in this whole mess is Trump. Can’t have that because Orange Man Bad, or tariffs bad, or Commie China good, or some other nitwitted nonsense.

I feel the question needs to be more specific.

The question is, what do our political leaders owe to countries they break? For example, I resent the inference that "we" invaded Iraq.

When did I agree that our armed forces should invade Iraq? And why should I pay to repair a country that I didn't break?

When our elected officials agree to accept refugees who seem to think that if women aren't in burqas, it's their God-given right to assault them, how many of these rapefugees are moving into the neighborhoods occupied by our elected officials?

Oh, they wish to invite the barbarians to move in and live in my neighborhood?

And before anyone suggests that we voted for them, I will point out that my state only has two Senators out of 100 (like all states), and I only voted on one Representative.

I had nothing to do with the overwhelming majority of any of our elected officials. And if they personally could be made to feel the consequences of upending other nations (without any help or approval from me), they'd probably exercise a lot more caution.

"In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the post-9/11 invasions were followed by yearslong slogs. The citizens of both countries have been made meaningfully worse off by ongoing American military meddling--assuming they survived at all."

No. This has been political meddling - no different from the scam Goebbels ran on the German people except for scale. American military action resulted in near-instant annihilation of an army boastful and reputed to be so large as to be untouchable. Since then, the same American political machine so easily seen as corrupt has insisted the our forces are police. The public buys this idea, too, never asking why we're still there.

Why are we still there?

"The citizens of both countries have been made meaningfully worse off by ongoing American military meddling--assuming they survived at all."

A rather bold assumption; I'd like to see some evidence that both Iraq and Afghanistan are "meaningfully worse off" than they were before we invaded.

Afghanistan, under the Taliban, was harboring a terrorist that attacked the US. Iraq, under Saddam, was sponsoring terrorism around the Middle East. Should we have NOT invaded and allow the status quo to continue until we were certain that we had a fail-proof plan for afterwards? How many more acts of terror would have been committed until then?

That's the effect those two countries had on others - terrorism.

The other bold assumption by this author is that "we" broke those countries. Hooey! Those countries were already "broken" before we invaded.

In addition to their exporting terrorism, the people living in those two countries had a miserable existence. They ARE better off today than they were before. If nothing else women in Afghanistan are no longer beaten with a rubber hose for not covering their face in public. Iraq no longer has the death squads run by Saddam's two sadistic sons running around the country. Young women are no longer picked up off the street by one of those sons to be his sexual playthings to be discarded when he grows tired of her.

Those are just a couple of ways, off the top of my head, that I can think of how they are better off.

Oh, and the purple fingers! For the first time ever - they got to vote. Even if those purple fingers didn't change much they, at least, showed the people there voting is possible. That they got a say in how their country should be.

Just like the allies got rid of the Japanese and German war leaders and the citizens of those two countries stepped up and rebuilt their countries; so, too, should the citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan step up to the plate and rebuild their countries. And not look to the US or others to continue to bail them out.

Sure, there are problems; but, for this author to suggest that they are worse off makes her sound like a Monday morning quarterback.

This is a big nope. Iraq was broken centuries before the first American set foot there. Thanks to fracking, the Middle East is no longer our problem. Our role should be limited to mutual aid with Israel, and trying to encourage reform across the region by whatever diplomatic means we have at hand.

(Of course, that latter makes an assumption that we have a competent diplomatic corps, which currently there is no evidence of.)

You can't impose modernity or democracy on a country or a people who are not ready for it; or at all. They must fight for it themselves. All you can do is remove the obstacles for them - the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, etc. They must do the rest.

Coming from an English tradition and the philosophy of the Enlightenment (who says Western Civilization ain't the best?), our forefathers were ready for democracy and modernity.

The question now is, are we? Or will we slide back into peasantry where someone else, nobility or government, takes charge of our lives and make the decisions for us?

Watching other countries struggle to establish stable democracies, I marvel at the luck the United States had in the Founding Fathers we had.

• The French Revolution devolved into chaos, terror, and finally, dictatorship.
• The Russian Revolution in March 1917 established a weak democracy, obsequious to the nobility, that died in October with the coming of the Bolsheviks.
• The German revolution of 1918 struggled for a two decades under the Weimar Republic and succumbed to the Nazis in 1933.
• South Africa had Nelson Mandela and FW DeKlerk, but no one else. de Klerk, being white, never had the broad popular base of support that Mandela had. His contribution was convincing Mandela to not create an interim [socialist] government in ending white rule. However, when Mandela died, the opportunity to turn South Africa into a stable multiracial democracy died with him.

In the years since World War II, only a small number of countries have successfully implemented stable, prosperous, lasting democracies. The idea that it can be done from without is a proven fallacy.

Our founders may have been slave owners and racists, but they established a lasting democratic republic that ended its own slavery, saved the world, and saw the error of its own racism. The question is, can we keep it?

> Thanks to fracking, the Middle East
> is no longer our problem.

IIUC, the States never got more than 10-15% of its energy from Middle Eastern sources. Had Saddam completed a significant market grab, it would have consequentialy disrupted Europe and a few other modern venues for civilization; and that would have been our problem.

Thanks to fracking, there's a whole lot of the things we can choose not be involved with.

I'm reminded of how Coney tried to calm me down after '16: We've had shitty presidents before. (And of course, the office was due for a mucking out.) And wars are crapshoots with unexpected outcomes both horrible and blessed.

Trump's (and America's) oblivious disinterest is going to have some horrible effects, but at this hour (and I mean 9:06 PST) I'm not yet grotesquely horrified.

Check in after lunch.

In the Stan, after we'd driven al Queda and the Taliban from the country, we should have sat down with each tribal group and explained why we made the rubble bounce. And that we're going to leave now, but if you host people al Queda again, we'll come back and make the rubble bounce some more.

I would have been very happy if a thousand years from now, Afghani mothers would threaten their naughty children with if you don't behave, the Americans will come and get you.

WRT Iraq, what would the ME look like if we had left Saddam in place? you think he'd sit idly by while those dirty Persians were busy building a bomb?

See, what you have here are a bunch of little countries, all populated by the most un-Christian funny-talking folk you can imagine, and if the zealots take over one of these countries, why, they'll knock down the next, and the next, and the next like a bunch of dominoes, and then you've got chaos. Chaos! And we can't have that.

So get the poor kids into uniform and get some kickbacks from the weapons manufacturers and let's make some money, um, kick some ass, and that will create order, eventually. But not too quickly.

We'll let you know when we're done feeding.