There is an overwhelming sense of unfairness and cruelty to all of this.

There's the money quote right there.

We agree, but we disagree. Your argument is that idealism and demanding purity keeps us focusing on the laudable goal of peace. My argument is that idealism and demanding purity allows us to scapegoat our leaders without facing the complexity that we're all culpable in war.

Your understanding of Iraq and Afghanistan are not wrong. They're not really understanding though. You have a chronology but not a comprehension. That comprehension is unpopular in the United States because - really - we did it.

Afghanistan was a stable monarchy until the King went on vacation and the Communists staged a coup. We can't have that, this is America. And since those filthy Communists were supported by the Soviet Union, obviously that can't happen. So we gave missiles to the animists, and we let the Saudis know we wanted their money in there, too, and the Saudis turned it into a holy war of the righteous vs. the Infidel, and we turned a messy pagan hinterland into a Wahabi hell that destroyed equality, annihilated historic sites and sheltered bin Laden and the problem with arming the mullahs and financing the madrasas for fifteen years is you're not going to wind that shit down, particularly now that the Wahabis think it's their playground and I don't know if you've ever noticed, but the Saudis do what we ask them to when they want to.

Afghanistan was created for us by us. Every hardship in it is because we couldn't stand to see the Soviets gain a foothold in the Middle East. Benezir Bhutto told us we were sowing dragon's teeth in '91 when we pulled out. Lo and Behold.

Iraq was a secular military despotism run by a rank demagogue who happened to oppose the Mullahs that blew us out of the middle east so we looked the other way when he spent 30 years making enemies across a thousand miles, stoking religious enmities and practicing a reign of terror. Then when he ceased to be convenient we knocked him out and left a power vacuum that stretches from the Mediterranean to the Himalayas. Iraq was created for us by us. Even Schwartzkopf knew you couldn't knock out the center without replacing it with something and what we replaced it with was ISIS.

And this is our foreign policy. This is how oil flows to us, why we win trade wars, all the little things that make being American much nicer than being Syrian. This is the cost of Empire and we hate being reminded that we pay for it in the blood of The Other.

And sure. We don't want to. We weren't asked. These are undeclared wars, clandestine combatants. But the democratic process led us to 26,000 bombs dropped, every single step of the way, and insisting it's his fault and not yours is having your cake and eating it too.