Liberal YouTubers

even during the Iraq war when we were spending billions China was making deals in Africa for minerals.

When will we ever learn ... old line from a song.

For U.S., Unmet Expectations in Iran Fit a Familiar Pattern in the Region

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/us/israel-us-iran-strategy-war.html?unlocked_article_code=1.UlA.tAkE.Ua4-QI9iW2-k&smid=url-share

"Iran’s military retaliation, along with the political defiance of its new leaders, evokes a decades-old pattern of unrealized goals for American interventions in the region....

"The United States has a tendency to overestimate what political outcomes can be engineered using overwhelming military power while underestimating the fallout, said Caitlin Talmadge, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specializes in Gulf security issues. “Air power is the U.S. drug of choice — we love to believe that it can achieve big political effects and also big military effects, yet the historical record doesn’t support that.”

While President Trump and other top U.S. officials repeatedly boast that Iran’s air force is extinct and its navy sits at the bottom of the sea, analysts noted that the country was never expected to take on the United States in a direct confrontation using a conventional military."