I read it as a statement regarding the US's foreign policy, and by extension a reflection on the cultural perception of foreign affairs and, ultimately, domestic ones.
Which was how I intended it to be read, so thank you. The "you" in my original post applies as much to our politicians as it does to the general public. Everyone is operating with limited data sets, especially in dealing with international issues as complex and long-running as Syria and its environs. My point was that it's very tempting to think that there exists a perfect solution to all problems if only the right people had enough power, and we inevitably get disappointed when things don't pan out optimally -- and then disappointed again when, years or decades later, we can see in hindsight that things would have gone better if only we'd done something else. We're so used to that disappointment that we campaign around it now because it won't ever go away.
Competent leaders are neither omnipotent solvers of all problems nor magic oracles able to divine exactly what we will in future think they should have done -- and as condescendingly obvious as that sounds, it's sometimes less obvious when we're implicitly expecting them to be, because we tend to assume people know more and have more options than they do. Cynicism towards politics is a fine thing, but if we're going to hold people to account, we would do well to make sure we're accurately gauging the other decisions they could have made rather than blaming them for problems literally beyond their ability to solve without breaking government.
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Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4235678 times)