[Cold Heat]

If you read my posts, I answered that in what I though was a extensive clear answer.

Some things that you break cannot be fixed because they are generationally broken and it takes a minimum of 30 years of management to get the first new generation in places of power or importance in a new regime like democracy in a place that has never had anything but tyranny or kings.

So if you leave early, and new tyranny replaces the old and what did you accomplish.

I made one exception, when I said that Cold war proxy battles in some little state are not intervened in for the same reasons. They have a bigger purpose and that is to destabilize your foe. The Proxy is just caught in the middle. You let your foe fix it.

[kabar]

If you use your prescription, "If you break it, you must fix it," then you circumscribe your ability to respond to immediate and long term threats. Moreover, we no longer have the resources to fix most of these problems.

So if you leave early, and new tyranny replaces the old and what did you accomplish.

I don't know how you divine when it is time to leave or when it is too early. In any event, we should address immediate threats regardless of whether we can implement a long term strategy or not.

I am not in favor of Colin Powell's Pottery Barn rule, which you support. It is a simplistic slogan, but in terms of implementing US foreign policy and protecting our strategic national interests, it hobbles and limits our actions.