[Shadow44]

Look at what happened afterwards. Iraq was invaded, and the US was spending billions to reshape the Middle East. The plan failed because Iraq turned into a quagmire and killed American support for more countries to be invaded. Instead, no war with Iran happened and the power vacuum was filled by the Iranians.

If there’s anything to be learned by this, is that these interventions are doing nothing but bankrupting and weakening us.

[Zhang Fei]

If there’s anything to be learned by this, is that these interventions are doing nothing but bankrupting and weakening us.

Bankrupting? That's way exaggerated. Government spending (federal, state and local) is about 40% of the economy. All of our spending in the Middle East and Afghanistan combined* is $75b a year, or about 0.375% of the $20T economy. It won't come close to bankrupting us. We spent the equivalent of 200% of the economy over 4 years of WWII and we came out just fine.

Liberals scream** about defense expenditures all the time, and I used to believe them. Then I looked at the numbers and realized that they're full of crap. Note that when Eisenhower talked about the military industrial complex, we were spending 10% of economic output on defense. We're now spending 4.5%.

* Page 16 shows a line-by-line itemization.

** To a liberal, every dollar of the economy not spent on the welfare state or hiking civil service salaries is a dollar wasted.

[jeffc]

"If there’s anything to be learned by this, is that these interventions are doing nothing but bankrupting and weakening us."

This statement doesn't hold water. Apply it to Iran, NK, China - it doesn't seem to bother them. Sooner or later, we will have to take the fight to them (sooner is better). A lesson we should have learned from WW2...