Look man. I think W. lied his way into Iraq. It’s common knowledge the Vietnam War was a disaster. I know the CIA was involved in other idiotic and self-defeating ploys during the Cold War, a period of history when we never met an “anti-Communist” strongman we didn’t like. (The very real brutality of Communist regimes isn’t a complete excuse.) I have nothing invested in the notion of America as a perfect angel on the world stage.
But I ask that anti-American conspiracy theories be, at a minimum, plausible, and ideally, actually true.
This is why I reject:
—9/11 “inside job” conspiracies;
—The notion that Israel dictates all of America’s foreign policy (in reality, the pro-Israel lobby is just one of many such groups jockeying for influence in Washington);
—Pro-Russian apologetics that hold that Russia was “backed into a corner” by NATO expansion, or the theory that a murky and unexplained CIA coup justifies Russian meddling and incursions and annexations and war crimes in Ukraine from 2014 to today. The reality is that Russia has to take responsibility for its own warmongering decisions without resort to projection and deflection.