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Notes -
I think a lot of people are just plain embarassed by their country's inability to do anything of note in those foreign
warsmilitary-humanitarian aid missions. They might be fine with staying out of there and they would be fine with going there and getting things done, but going there, being unable to say what you're trying to do, wasting time and money and then going home to see a house of cards immediately collapse is just profoundly unsatisfying.There's a glimmer of that, but it's hard for me to shake the impression that a lot of it is just a certain naive faith in the efficacy of brutality. It's also why get people proposing things like bombing drug cartels or sending the military in to fight crime, why you have an entire American film genre whose recurring central theme boils down to "police brutality is good", why back in 2003 you had people bragging we were going to turn Iraq into a parking lot, why you have people who think hazing is good, etc...
The failures in the GWOT make these types angry and frustrated because it contradicts their desire for decisive, dominating wins, but the tolerance/appetite for violence predated those failures.
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