(News, senior Iranian general killed in US airstrike.)
It looks like the inner circle of Washington power-players, who imagine themselves Great Game players in the Middle East, have either failed to make a New Decade’s Resolution to get off the intervention-addiction, or, if they did make such a resolution, have spectacularly failed to keep it for more than three days.
Killing a foreign general in peacetime. Not a good look.
Since my “current-events awareness” and political consciousness began to take shape in the 1990s, these kinds of interventions have been a constant. No matter who is in power, they always seem to happen; no matter what is said on the campaign trail, they always seem to happen.
The Iraq War of the 2000s, which drifted along for years after the March 2003 invasion (at enormous cost and with second-order effects generally recognized to be bad) was the most egregious case, but many others, large and small, fall into the same general category.
I have been against these interventions since 2002 while still a mid-teenager. What benefit they are to us, I do not see.
These types of interventions, though, are hardly new, either. I remember the strange 1983 Granada invasion, which seemed quite random. I remember the 1989 invasion of Panama, which was solely to “capture” the president, Noriega – who while undoubtedly a bad guy (just like Soleimani), probably didn’t justify the complications that ensued.
Farther back, there was the known involvement in Pinochet’s coup in Chile (the OTHER Sept 11, 1973). There were invasions back before WW2 (Nicaragua, Panama, Dominican Republic, Haiti). Arguably, the Mexican-American war of 1846 and Perry in Tokyo Bay, 1854.
It’s more than an addiction, it is our national character.
For better or for worse.
I would have to consider the first of the true foreign interventions, in roughly the sense we became familiar with them by our era, to be:
1898 and what we call the Spanish-American War.