The USA has a policy of not invading local countries, because they're too close to home. So, its mostly power projection "fighting them over there, so we don't have to fight them .. here".

Really, this is a fundamental issue to understand. USA is not a peace-bringing nation - it is a war-projection nation. In the same way that one can use fire to fight fires, the USA thinks its war-making is actually bringing peace to the world.

I know - it doesn't make any sense. But, the military-industrial complex which runs the USA doesn't care if you think it makes sense. It only cares about dropping bombs, clearing the shelves of inventory with short half lives, and replacing it with new inventory.

EDIT: the claim that USA's wars are "just, righteous wars" is highly specious and, frankly, risible. The USA has toppled more democratically elected officials than any other nation in the history of mankind. I urge you to consider the hubris of the statement: "the USA only fights good wars", because there is fiction, and there is fact.

The fact is, a lot of people in democratic societies around the world feel that the USA hasn't fought a good war since WW2, and in fact that the opposite is true: the USA fights to put its own dictators into power. Even a casual investigation of this fact yields more than enough evidence to support the statement: the USA is up to no good.

The wars the US has involved itself in post-WW2 have almost always been wars with the aim of:

1. Preventing the spread of Soviet backed Authoritarian Communism.

2. Removing brutal dictators from power.

Both noble and justifiable goals.

Can you define "almost" more clearly ?

I'm not going to judge the people that did it, bceause it was another time, but I hope the US public opinion has evolved so that some of US antics in that period could not happen now.

e.g.: involvement in the fall of Mossadegh, support to the Pinochet regime, support to the Shaddam regime, including the sale of chemical weapons during the Iran-Irak war, support to the contras...

Panama (1989) was an invasion with troops.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Pana...

Yes, almost 30 years ago the US invaded Panama to depose a dictator who had turned Panama into an international money laundering and drug smuggling center.

Well, you did ask...

.. and more to the point, it didn't work. Panama is still a festering cesspool of money laundering and drug trafficking.

Its just that, the USA has its hand in the pie now. And that is the true reason for that heinous war.

Operation Just Cause (we felt like it)

Usually it's a salvation to be occupied by US compared to Russia - they just kill, steal and trash territory making it doomed (Transnistria, Osetia, Ukraine teritories, Kuril islands) - a true Mordor.

So .. where is all that good ol' American-supported living in .. Libya?

Syria?

Iraq?

Afghanistan?

Cambodia?

Pakistan?

Yemen?

Nigeria?

Japan

Germany

South Korea

Every Western nation supported by the Marshall plan

You're right, but it goes both ways and not 100% one way or the other

Yeah, the USA did do some good for the world. 80 years ago.

But what it is doing today is a terrible, atrocious tragedy, and its far beyond the point where the means justify the ends.

I mean that as someone who follows closely the cost of American warfare, and as someone who refuses to ignore the human tragedy it is bringing to current generations of people who really, really do not deserve to have had their infrastructure utterly destroyed, their lives ruined, their children left in rubble, on a daily basis, because some smart American decided it had to be so.

The problem is, we wanted to do Iraq and Afghanistan and get out. If we had done a Marshall Plan in Iraq, we would have had maybe 100,000 troops there for a decade, but it would have been stable when we left.

The problem is, you thought it was acceptable to be there in the first place.

Fuck, its 2017, are we really still explaining this? Of course we are. We must.

> we would have had maybe 100,000 troops there for a decade

The US has had north of 100k troops in Iraq for 7 years, then about 50k for 3 more years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_troop_surge_of_2007#/...

The U.S. doesn't leave. Pretty much any where we send troops, we tend to set up bases there and remain indefinitely.

Just look at Germany, Japan, Korea, Iraq, ...