Gyroscopic Investing

Why exactly did we fail to reconstruct Iraq, and why are we failing in Afghanistan? (Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s new book, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan, is the Afghan version of We Meant Well in detailing the catastrophic outcomes of reconstruction in that never-ending war.) No doubt more books, and not a few theses, will be written, noting the massive corruption, the overkill of pouring billions of dollars into poor, occupied countries, the disorganization behind the effort, the pointlessly self-serving vanity projects -- Internet classes in towns without electricity -- and the abysmal quality of the greedy contractors, on-the-make corporations, and lame bureaucrats sent in to do the job. Serious lessons will be extracted, inevitable comparisons will be made to post-World War II Germany and Japan and think tanks will sprout like mushrooms on rotted wood to try to map out how to do it better next time.

http://www.thenation.com/article/169415 ... or-america

I think imperialism is almost always a disaster. It seems to be least disasterous when the occupying power morphs into the culture of the people they take over. That is what the Nubians did when they conquered Ancient Egypt:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphinx_of_Taharqo

I guess that is a bit like the observation that the only happy lottery winners seem to be those who pretend that they don't have the winnings and keep up their old life/jobs/friends etc.

Here is a very nice 2:59 compilation of George W. Bush's 2000 campaign rhetoric about foreign military adventures.

http://youtu.be/F9SOVzMV2bc

We are all of course aware of Obama's 2008 campaign rhetoric about turning away from war and violence, which was apparently so arousing to the international peace community that he received his Nobel Peace Prize before actually creating any peace anywhere.

I would say that the award Obama should get would be the one for being the best at targeted killings.  With a compliant media and state of the art drones, you can do a lot of targeted killing, and he's had a lot of success in that area.

An empire just can't resist foreign military adventures, and sooner or later this tendency leads to ruin.