(From time to time, I have to remind people that I do not necessarily share or endorse the positions expressed in what I share, although if I share it, it means I find it at least interesting) Think about it: The United States has been wrestling with the problem of race for over two centuries, and fought a bloody civil war over that very issue. Slavery was abolished 150 years ago, and while significant progress has been made since then, Ferguson is just another sign that the country still has a long way to go. Yet a little more than 10 years ago, U.S. foreign-policy elites from both political parties blithely assumed that the United States could topple governments in Iraq and Afghanistan and then quickly set up new institutions that would handle deep ethnic, sectarian, or tribal divisions in a just, equitable, and effective manner. And despite how that effort turned out, they repeated the same error in Libya in 2011. What could they have been thinking? The United States hasn’t been able to fix its racial divisions in a century and a half, but we thought we could settle some equally deep divisions in a few years in foreign countries that we barely understood. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the very definition of hubris.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 10:24:35 +0000
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