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I understand the complexity well enough (still poorly) to know why we muck about with things like indirectly fighting the USSR in Vietnam, or storming Afghanistan. I'm sure I was as hawkish following 9/11 as anyone, but I was also more naive then. It's easy to rally support to punch the enemy when they hurt us so badly, but we also have to be pragmatic about it too. Are we winning if we kill a bunch of bad guys but now can't take toothpaste on airplanes, get frisked, miss flights, etc... and those bad guys are replaced with new bad guys?
Bin Laden might have spearheaded the attacks, but it was all Saudi men that did the dirty work. I don't consider the Saudi's to be our allies because they don't share enough of US values. We should be less tolerant of bad behavior from our allies, just as we should be less tolerant of bad behavior from those closest to us (starting with ourselves).
As I said with Iraq, I'd have sent bombs to Hussain the moment he broke the peace treaty by kicking out weapons inspectors. No need to invent WMD to justify taking him out. He's provided enough direct reasons without needing to invent new ones.
Bad ideas like Communism are doomed to fail, and I take a Regan view of fighting it; to simply point out how terrible things are in places that adopt it, and how great we've got things. Let bad ideas fail on their own. If liberty and democracy and free markets is a bad idea, they would fail.
That said, I'm not an isolationist. When people are being murdered by their governments unjustly, that's intolerable. Hard to say how much we should expect people to defend themselves, and how much to intervene though.
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