Talk politics.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/libya/2019-02-18/obamas-libya-debacle

^Is entirely and directly connected to what did and didn't happen in Libya in 2011. Back when George Bush geared up the United States to his senseless regime change adventure in Iraq, crowds thronged the world. London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, and other societies as well as in the USA witnessed some of the largest protests in the history of the antiwar movement. These protests were entirely right, given that Bush's rationale for the war was a cheap regime change that went off the rails into something far more ambitious, the point where US imperialism's unilateral hand died in the looting of Baghdad and the rise of the war in Anbar Province. 

It may be too much to expect American antiwar activists of the present to emulate the past version that protested JFK, LBJ, Nixon, and Ford with equal fervor. It did not protest the Long War in Iraq from 1993-2000, when Clinton was in office, and it made no serious protestations about the humanitarian crisis imposed by the use of mass starvation as a 'soft' version of regime change (when that's considered 'soft' power the concept of hard and soft power may need a bit of a rewrite). The global crowds that protested all those decades ago and were conspicuous in their silence are the ones that still puzzle me. Surely the lives of Libyans are worth as much as the lives of Iraqis? Or at least Libyan oilfields if not their lives? And yet somehow, surprisingly, and yet not at all so they were not and are not. 

Of course it's worth emphasizing that the Libyan War fits squarely into the reality of American involvement in the Muslim world and the ongoing seven wars here, including the resumed war in Somalia. The United States has taken upon itself to indulge in wholesale regime change of a sort matched only by the oscillating totalitarian movements of fascism and communism in the first half of the 20th Century, deeming rulers to rise and fall on the sake of nothing more than its whim and how and in what ways it chooses to deploy its power and how brutally likewise. 

This decision was and is one of the greatest follies the United States has indulged in in recent memory. It hasn't paid a steep price in lives, but it is squandering its wealth to increasingly unsustainable degrees. The Muslim world in turn is paying the real price in lives and in hatreds and animosities stirred up the world over, and in the hydra of reactionary dogmatism that regularly gets strengthened by the USA pumping money into two of the three main sponsors and devastating the enemies of the third. 

So why then is it that only the Iraq case in 2003 saw those massive protests of it? Was that a one-off, or did it serve a particular partisan purpose and when that purpose failed, did whatever passed for conviction on the part of the true believers of that movement go with that failure? 

Why is the Iraq War treated as a moral crisis to end all crises, but the Libyan War is seen only in the faux GOP scandal of Benghazi? Surely Libya should be one of the all time record US disasters on par with Beirut, if seen by a more truthful analysis? Personally I would say it fits into the same chronic pattern where history exists selectively in the eyes in the USA, at least, of its progressives. Republicans in 1968 affect 2019, 2011 under a Democratic President does not. 

Time to go with a very recent illustration of how little people can and will choose to learn or not learn from history.

The first example is archetypal, now, as a classic example of imperial hubris bringing about the start of what is now the relative decline of the American Empire in all but the sphere of brute military force.

( All the myriad ways a protracted air war wasn't one and was somehow a state of peace when Bill Clinton did it )

Now, after all of this, George W. Bush, seeing an endless set of ground and air strife in Iraq, somehow concluded his brilliant move was to do what the USA actually did want daddy dearest to do in 1991 and punished him for being intelligent enough to avoid, namely launching ground troops to Baghdad on a stunning venture of US imperial power. This war, started in 2003, and ongoing anew now in the form of the spillover of the Syrian Civil War and the first attempts to seriously alter the Westphalian concept of the state prevailing since 1648, as well as the Versailles-era geopolitical boundaries of the United States, was and is the great archetype of US military clusterfuckery since Vietnam.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/war-in-iraq-begins

However, content to not allow George W. Bush to have a monopoly on willful, moronic, self-destructive vendettas with a petty tyrant in the Middle East who licked to flip the bird to the Great Satan and tweak the tail of the American turkey, the Obama Administration decided to go to war against the regime of Muammar of Many Spellings, the charismatic military despot who'd presided over Libya for some decades at the time of his removal.

( cut for long reminder that the USA's had a hate on for ManySpellings to rival that for Mr. Hussein )

Ensue the Obama Administration deciding, in spite of the empirically valid proof the Long War in Iraq offered, as well as the Longer War in Afghanistan, to replicate this genius move a third time and remove yet another minor tin pot tyrant with a fetish for sending thugs to shoot up his neighbors to remind people he existed.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2016/02/03/a-tough-call-on-libya-that-still-haunts/?utm_term=.fd70f5ec1820

In the sense of removing ManySpellings the war was successful. In every other standard it replicated and exceeded the clusterfuck of 1991-present on a far grander scale in far less time, which arguably could be said to be the difference between the Bush kind of evil and what Obam did. Obama was much more efficient in his disasters and able to make them worse in infinitely shorter timeframes.

And now, not content to bring US 'liberation' by the crash of the bomb to Libya and Iraq, and to perpetuate and worsen the Afghan Civil War with yet another superpower causing chaos wherever it goes, the USA of Trump is proposing 5,000 troops to ignore logistics, geography, and viability of a proposed approach to presumably launch an anabasis into Venezuela, a move that will go far less well than Iraq did, and since Iraq is a sterling example of a fiasco of Churchillian proportions......

The United States is an empire stuck in a rut of a Roman degree. It sees problems, unleashes awesome military force expecting people to 1) accept it, and 2) be grateful if they survive for living in a bombed-out charred rubble field splattered with the blood and entrails of their relatives. Somehow this never happens and the USA is regularly bemused that it doesn't.

I'd like to think reality  will ensue sufficiently the USA has to accept it, but it hasn't with three spectacular failures in a generation, and I see no reason to expect it suddenly will in Venezuela. So even by the bloody and savagely ironic standards of history, these recent illustrations of a cyclical pattern are especially gruesome at multiple levels.