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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

That only works if the massive resources spent on Afghanistan and Iraq helped with the Pax Americana. I see no reason to think it did, and a multitude of reasons to think the opposite. How many millions have now died because we knocked over Iraq without anything resembling a real plan for handling the aftermath?

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because we knocked over Iraq without anything resembling a real plan for handling the aftermath

And Libya and Syria...

And Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan again back in the 80s...the interventionist policy has always been about U.S. corporate interests abroad, not about democracy or peace.

https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/Overthrow--A...

^^ Not completely without bias, but probably contains a lot of inarguable historical facts that you weren't even close to being taught in high school or even college.

Lies My Teacher Told Me is another pretty good, depressing read that covers some of this and prior American history with analysis.

Maybe this is another lie my teacher told me, but is the US now responsible for Syrian Civil War?

Not entirely - it was already happening before we stuck our noses in. But there's little doubt that we made it worse.

From my perspective, it seems that GWB created the seed that would grow into ISIS. Then it was Obama that gave it the fertile soil to grow.

Not following your logic, Obama gave ISIS fertile soil to grow by removing American troops from Iraq, which seems the opposite of a Pax America policy.

I also don't understand how fighting ISIS made it worse.

Obama's attacks on Syria and especially Libya created a power vacuum - the incumbent leadership was bad, but in its absence there was a void that anything could move into. If Kaddafi were still running Libya, ISIS wouldn't have been. This is also true in Syria, but perhaps to a lesser degree than Libya, since the vacuum was less hard.

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