[_moof]

Hell, if you zoom out from the Middle East, you can go all the way back to Vietnam. (I don't know much about Korea.) That's over six decades of being wrong--sixty years of belligerence with nothing to show for it but a horrific body count and whole generations turned against us.

[lamontcg]

Yeah I was just sticking with events in my lifetime, I just wasn't alive much for Vietnam, and wasn't very concerned with politics right after I was born.

Someone reminded me about Reagan sending weapons to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban, which I do remember (and Carter boycotting the Olympics).

[CapricornNoble]

>>>That's over six decades of being wrong--sixty years of belligerence with nothing to show for it but a horrific body count

The problem with this argument is we have no way of definitively proving it one way or the other. If Communist Vietnam hadn't spent 10 years and a million lives dislodging the US, could Communism have overtaken SE Asia? Would Vietnam have had the military experience necessary to depose the Khmer Rouge after that regime killed ~25% of Cambodia's population? How many excess deaths would you be counting if Thailand's Communist insurgency had eventually turned into a Khmer Rouge clone (itself having copied the worst excesses of Mao's Cultural Revolution)? https://www.cia.gov/static/e73ecdedf076611c592b1d8397cbe61a/...

Bottom line: Hindsight is 20/20. Don't assume that the outcome we have is the worst one possible and therefore all has been for naught. That said.....hold people accountable for shit decision-making, and there definitely has been that in spades.