US foreign policy - dumb and dumber

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat the past. TPP was a young adult of military draft age during the Vietnam Conflict (only Congress can declare war, and no war was declared), and it was obvious from the start that the military might of the USA could not win this conflict, could not defeat an enemy with a "non-traditional" approach to fighting the conflict, and this has proven pretty much true in each and every conflict the US has engaged in since. Apparently our country's civilian and military leaders are slow learners, but of course the 'Mercan public eats up the "shock & awe" rhetoric as if it were apple pie. A rational look at our foreign policy easily uncovers its fundamental flaw. Sadly, it looks as if the USA is getting ready to make the same mistake again.   Smarten up people! This is what happens when you take a month long vacation from most of the world news; things seem so much worse when you get back, and maybe they are.   

Barbarians and their enablers

You give a kid a BB gun, and sooner or later he'll shoot it at some windows. It's a given of human nature. You give rebels, terrorists, or even some other type of militia under limited central control some big boom-booms, and sooner or later they'll shoot at something they shouldn't have.  And of course giving an implement of destruction to anybody who is more likely to shoot than to think makes you partly responsible for the outcome. This means you really have to think about what kind of weapons you give to trigger happy groups.  In this case Russian-backed separatists in the Ukraine were apparently given a big boom-boom, one capable of shooting down a high-flying passenger jet, so Vlad, some of the responsibility falls upon the person who gave them the boom-boom.  And the world is quite right to be both angry and seek some redress because these irresponsible actions, both providing the weapon and hitting the launch button, allowed this local conflict to transition into an international problem in a single act of violence against non-combatants. Such acts are those of pure barbarians, those who destroy for the simple act of destroying. So what do you do with such barbarians?  That's not so easy.