We have ignored CIA’s ginned-up political wars

From American Mind and Knuckledraggin 

“It is one thing to invade a country, and an entirely different level of atrocity to send a bunch of unregulated foreign extremists hopped up on hashish and Captagon to do the job.”

“Time and again, the regime has empowered violent, often genocidal groups and individuals, set them like mad dogs on a targeted regime, and then denied knowledge and responsibility when, as in Afghanistan, and Libya, and Syria, the dogs turned around to bite their owner.”

“Just as we never stopped using child labor, but merely transferred production to countries where we do not have to see or take responsibility for it, we continue to use extremists and criminals to engage in conflicts and commit atrocities the American people would not accept from our own soldiers.”

https://americanmind.org/salvo/pillaging-by-proxy/

Americans decided to stop Nazi Germany and militarist Japan by any means necessary. That war required 16 million Americans in uniform. When Russian Communists became the major foe of the U.S. after the war, the conflict took on different techniques, with the war in Korea and the war in Vietnam the only truly “hot” challenges of the Cold War. What we have had for the past 30 years are incidents that have not needed the full might of American power, if any use at all. Americans are leery of large-scale confrontations, preferring a few hundred or thousand special operators, or, even better, hired guns. The problem, of course, is you can’t always control the barbarians you hire.