Death of the whiz kid: Robert Strange McNamara, 1916-2009.

That's the difficult part, indeed. In WW2, the U.S. was attacked. The U.S. did not initiate aggression. Of course, it may be argued that the American foreign policy in the Pacific in the 1930s forced Japan to war.

In WW2 it was quite obvious there was a threat to the U.S., and to the entire world. I don't want to claim that it was "the good war", but the U.S. won it without losing moral authority.

Being the world police is an ungrateful job. If you act, people will accuse you of interventionism. If you don't act, people will accuse you of siding with genocidal thugs. It's tough.

But look at what happened in Somalia in 1993. The trauma of that incident led the Clinton administration to avoid intervening in Rwanda. In the 1990s the Europeans were unable to solve the mess in the Balkans until the U.S. intervened. There are many ways of intervening, some smarter than others.

The intervention in Vietnam was poorly-led. Both sides adopted an insane "war of attrition" doctrine. The U.S. needed to kill the entire population to win that war. It's kind of stupid to kill the people one's supposed to be defending. Some claim that it would have been wiser to invade North Vietnam and engage in a more conventional warfare in which the U.S. military power could be leveraged. I suppose the U.S. government was too afraid that China would intervene if that were the case, as it happened in Korea. Sometimes one needs to choose the lesser of two evils...

Europe owes its stability to 50+ years of American protection. The European anti-Americanism is blasé, ungrateful, and naive. Right after 9/11 the western world was with the U.S. and approved the war in Afghanistan. It all changed when the U.S. decide to invade Iraq unilaterally. The perception of the U.S. as a thug is not entirely unjustified.

When I say that the U.S. should stop intervening in other people's business, I mean that the U.S. should stop planting brutal dictatorships around the world. These may satisfy Washington's interests in the short term, but they're a disaster in the long term. In the 1950s a left-wing government was elected in Iran, and the CIA and the MI6 orchestrated a coupe to depose the democratically elected government and plant a dictatorship. Same happened in Chile in the 1970s. Sure, back then there was a threat of the having the Cold War turning very, very hot indeed, and sometimes pawns have to be sacrificed. But people don't easily forget. This sort of Uncle Sam's "baby-sitting" prevents the people from doing mistakes on their own, and gives them a common enemy, the U.S.. Let them fail on their own. Especially so if their government was democratically elected.

There are smarter ways of fighting for resources. I think the 1991 Gulf War was a prime example. Vietnam was an act of insanity that should never be repeated. If you're going to waste an entire generation of American boys and tear the fabric of the American society, the least you should do is make sure the war is worth fighting.