Things sure are different now. Five years later, the so-called, "War On Terror" (SCWOT) has seen us fail to win over enough influential and powerful friends in Pakistan, Central Asia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, not to mention Mexico, Venezuela, Nicaragua and most of Latin America, Europe and Asia.
North Korea still isn't talking to us, and is on the way to having operational nukes and missiles to deliver them.
Mexico is bitterly divided, and most of Latin America is veering towards hostility and anti-Americanism in the wake of the Bolivarian revolution, even as Fidel Castro lays on his death bed.
"How could this be?" America wonders. You win some, you lose some, right? How come we are losing on all fronts at once?
A clue as to the diplomatic formula for American failure could always be seen in our disasters of the past: backing the wrong side. That is certainly still true today. We back the rich and powerful for "stability" instead of the poor and oppressed for "justice."
A perfect example of us stepping in it is in just about every foreign affairs article of today's papers, but this dispatch from Beirut by Michael Slackman sheds a glaring light on the hypocrisy, especially where he says
In many ways, Hezbollah has adopted a strategy that has been cheered by the White House in the past, in places like Ukraine, and even Lebanon, leaning on large, peaceful crowds to force unpopular governments to resign and pave the way for elections.
But this time Washington and its allies have said the protest amounts to a coup d’état, fueling charges that the United States supports democratic practices only when its allies are winning.
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