Once again the political debate is caught between minutiae and generalities so platitudinous as to be meaningless.

President Bush wants our attention focused on the good General Petraeus and small variations on troop levels over the next year. Basically, this focus allows him to buy time. Maybe things will turn around on the ground in Iraq. Maybe the Iraquis will suddenly decide to make peace and live like brothers. Maybe pigs will fly.

The Democrats, on the other hand, talk about ending the war and bringing the troops home, without any nuanced sense of how that might really be done. Senator Biden is the exception; he regularly talks about how long it will take to put all the troops on a bus and ship them out. Years, apparently. Who knew it took so long to get on a bus?

The real debate should be focused on the world view that brought us this debacle. President Bush and the Neo-cons had their chance. They got to try their mixture of bellicosity and wishful thinking (‘if only we rattle our sabers enough, democracy will spring up like corn in Kansas’.)

This philosophy failed miserably, and yet it is essentially what all the current Republican candidates are espousing. And what have the Democrats offered in return? A silly argument about when a president should talk to Castro.

They’d better do it soon, or they’ll have to enlist the services of a medium.

It’s time for a more sophisticated discussion of what America’s role is in the world. We citizens of the world’s largest democracy tend to have a rosy, rather naïve view of our purpose on the planet, and others’ views of us. We vaguely imagine that we wish the world well, except for those Axis of Evil countries and some shadowy narco-terrorists, and that the world wishes us well in return.

But the reality is a little darker than that.

Quick quiz. What do the following nation-states have in common?
Hawaii, Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Honduras, Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, Chile, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Answer: from 1893 to today, leaving aside the two World Wars, the United States engaged in wars, regime changes, or other military adventures in each of these (former) countries.
Some we annexed, some we set up as puppets, some we just destroyed – or attempted to destroy.

Do we really mean the rest of the world well? What is our role on the planet? If we’re the world’s most powerful state, and most powerful democracy, isn’t it time we started acting responsibly to make the planet a better place for everyone?