http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/americas-misadventures-greater-middle-east/

America’s Misadventures in the Greater Middle East

by Stephen Kinzer August 2, 2016 America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History by Andrew J. Bacevich (Random House, 2016), 480 pages.
America’s Continuing Misadventures in the Middle East by Chas W. Freeman Jr. (Just World Books, 2016), 256 pages.
Few forces in American public life are as powerful as the one that pulls people in Washington into the foreign policy mainstream. Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, the press, think tanks — all seem ready and indeed eager to be sucked into the deadening consensus that prevents the United States from adapting its foreign policies to a changing world. They treat original thinking as the germ of a frightful plague. Those who offer new ideas are stigmatized as — in John McCain’s wonderful phrase — “wacko birds.” http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/americas-misadventures-greater-middle-east/