The US never thought of it as memetic warfare. The Bush administration naively assumed that "freedom" (in practice, Western-style liberal democracy) is humanity

The US never thought of it as memetic warfare. The Bush administration naively assumed that "freedom" (in practice, Western-style liberal democracy) is humanity's native, default state. They thought all we had to do was liberate the Afghans from the Taliban, and the Iraqis from Saddam, and freedom would do the rest. We saw how that turned out.