You’re absolutely right, I can’t believe that the US forced Pakistan to found the Taliban half a decade after the end of the Afghanistan War. I can’t believe we forced Gaddafi to be a horrific dictator and serial rapist. I can’t believe we forced Somalia to go through the past what, 55 years of chaos? I can’t believe we forced Assad to inherit the ‘socialist’ state of his father, and like a good little monarchist stooge, continue his father’s repressive policies. God, it’s so terrible how the West is behind everything, working the world like a puppetmaster, except when anything improves, at which point we are curiously absent.

Or perhaps we should be blamed for arming the mujahideen - after all, it would have been much more moral if the Afghans just rolled over and let the Soviets massacre them, just like the Soviet-aligned forces massacred literal hundreds-of-thousands of unarmed civilians in the course of their occupation.

Interventionism is typically a fool’s game without winners; that doesn’t equate to any of the fucking conclusions being proposed here, except that we should be intervening a lot fucking less.