Agree 100% but I'd go a bit further. This, BTW is Thomas Barnett's idea of a "Sysadmin force" modeled on the British foreign service. It's totally unreasonabl

Agree 100% but I'd go a bit further. This, BTW is Thomas Barnett's idea of a "Sysadmin force" modeled on the British foreign service. It's totally unreasonable to expect a bunch of 20 year olds with guns who serve a one year tour and don't even speak the local language to entirely transform the culture of another country. It's not at all clear to me that this is even doable in the expected timeframe with some other force. The problem is that the U.S. may go somewhere with one objective "Stop Al-Queda from planning terrorist attacks", but then after the invasion there are all of these other default goals that we just expect to be true when we leave, like "there should be centralized democratic power" and "girls should go to school", and "women should have equal rights", and "boys should not be used as sex slaves for local warlords." Making these sorts of transformations of another society is extremely difficult and impossible when your people don't even speak the language, much less understand all of the nuances of the local culture, and even if we did, it would take decades. The main thing that needs to change in U.S. foreign policy is to have explicit, achievable victory conditions that are better than the current situation. We cannot just say "we have to depose the evil dictator", go in, smash some stuff, and then just wing it from there. If we cannot even describe how we're going to get from the current situation to our desired, stable outcome, we should not get involved, or come up with a more limited goal. We saw the very same things happen in Syria and Libya, except without a U.S. occupation force. In Syria, we didn't like Assad, but the problem was that all of the alternatives were either too weak to hold power (FSA), or even worse than Assad (ISIS, Al Nusra). In Libya, we didn't like Gaddafi, but there was no identifiable alternative, so after he was killed, the country basically just descended into chaos.