The lesson that most Americans are learning now about foreign interventionism, I learned in 1999 in Kosovo. When I went there, I was full of ideas about helping people and saving the world, then realized that the reasons we went there were false, the people we aided should have been the enemy, and the whole mission was none of our business. We killed hundreds (or thousands) of people by bombing them, then got in there and watched the genocide that we were trying to prevent, except the Albanians were the ones doing the killing. People in third world countries want victory, not peace. They want to be the ones in charge, not create a democracy. That is what the US thinktanks and the ideologues on either side don't understand. They have such an ethnocentric worldview that they think that everyone's version of "freedom" is like ours. They think that everyone wants a government like ours. The truth is that many times they don't.
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