Our Kind of Guys

I was cooking tonight while the four o'clock news came on on our classical music station. I try to avoid the news, but I did not succeed tonight, and I heard one of our governments ever present idiots say that in order to fight radical extremists we had to find "more moderate rebels".

I believe this was an oxymoron spoken by a moron, for when have rebels ever been moderate?
To paraphrase George Santayana, those who do not remember history are doomed to be Americans, and our history is rife with rebels we thought were controllable and would be our guys.Saddam Hussein was our guy until he wasn't, and look what our generous interference has wrought there. To fight the Russians in Afghanistan, we chose Osama Bin Ladin as one of our guys. We are always trying to depose leaders we do not like on every continent, and then are surprised by the snakes who slither out of the rocks to help us, then turn on us.

Iran,Panama. Vietnam. I do not suppose anyone remembers them. I suppose we will be looking for "moderate rebels" in Nigeria next. This is the danger of being a people who do not care about history,  like the Americans interviewed on Martin Luther King Day who thought King had died peacefully in his sleep and had been the first African American on the moon.