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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.

no....I did leave a exception for a strategic threat...ie: Russia

China

What other countries matter.

I left the exception of when we intervene politically and in other ways ie; Cold war

But the idea there is to leave the mess to be cleaned up by the larger foe.

I was addressing Libya as a perfect example of a break it/fixit rule. We should not have intervened. How about Egypt, How about Iraq.

Afghanistan initially was a response to a attack on our homeland. I was good with what Bush did. I hollered like a banshee when Obama turned it into a project and now he is leaving it too early just as he did Iraq, and all the crap we stirred up will just return to the outhouse in both places and all that investment and lives were totally wasted.

A total boondoggle waste.

A generation is 30 years as a rule for the first turnover. After that mathematically it starts to accelerate to get a total turnover based on at what age the kids are born to the new generation to make the third turnover. To change a countries political future and teach them new tricks that they have never done before, the generation that was there when you intervened will not be able to hold it together after the first problem arises. They will revert to the old ways, but the second generation educated in a modern way by the interventionist. (ie: us) Will have the knowledge and will not have the old wounds of a millennia of strife and inter tribal bigotry.

The 3rd generation will be even better. It might take 50 years to see those results as they emerge. But when you leave, you leave a stable society. The expense in this case would be worth it, never to return and to have a ally.