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ur-whale

> Say what you will of the Americans, they will always do the right thing

Are you living in some sort of bizzaro parallel dimension?

They most certainly haven't since the end of WWII

Top of a very, very long list : Irak.

They didn't explore anything. The two possible explanations for the decision to go to Irak are:

   1) sheer stupidity

   2) advancement of US interests at the expense of killing half a million people, so in other words: sheer evil

My money is on 2)

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Just off the top of my head: Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua, Chile, Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria.

The notion that the US does the right thing for the rest of the world, even after having done all the wrong things, is ridiculous on its face.

What's wrong with the US role in Korea, exactly?

Instated a military dictatorship in the south and helped it crush local worker councils and indigenous resistance. Then invaded the north and burned entire cities to the ground until almost no building was left standing and in the process killed a large proportion of the population.

I recommend Blowback Season 3 on the topic, it's very well done.

> advancement of US interests at the expense of killing half a million people

Half a million are only direct casualties of war. Excess deaths due to the war are over a million.

the phrase having explored all other options is clear, it means the Americans will do the right thing after they have done all the wrong things and tried to make them work. When they cannot make the wrong things work then the will finally, grudgingly, do the right thing. If they can make the wrong thing work they will stick with that.

The idea of the ironic viewpoint is of course that some other countries have a larger bag of wrong things they might be willing to try.

It's a pretty common comedic trope in English writing to say that someone will do right only after doing wrong.

So, the high dudgeon in response is rather missing the point.

Nice convoluted defense of an indefensible pov.

But Occam's razor applies here.

no it's more of a convoluted explanation of a complicated bit of English usage I assumed you were unfamiliar with given your comment and neglecting to quote the salient phrasing.

Occam's razor is that it was meant to be comedy, because it being serious is not really credible. The rest of the responses seem to agree that if it is taken seriously, this statement is ridiculous.

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