“Let’s make peace the way we did in Stanleyville and Saigon”.  The lines are 50 years old, but the Harvard math  lecturer  who wrote them is still alive, as far as we know: the great (and final?) Amurcan political satirist Tom Lehrer.  Where are the comic writers of today who could sing their way to  Armageddon so sweetly?  What’s that you say?  There are no sitting duck targets like those disastrous interventions of yesteryear in French Indochina and the Belgian Congo.
Well, how about every mixup of western troops in the last two decades in the troubles of the Middle East?  Iraq is, as long predicted, quickly sinking back into the authoritarian nightmare of the Saddam era.  Civil war seems inevitable, as is already happening in Syria, where no one has intervened.  In the course of only a year, Libya has already reconstituted itself into the tribal areas of pre-Ghaddafi days.  Egypt’s future is completely unpredictable and unnerving.  Afghanistan is already pretty much  in the hands of the various factions that will take over the moment the last US troops leave. Like the Brits (several times ) and the Russians before them, the US will soon leave Afghanistann in undignified disarray.  We can  only hope it is not quite as desperate and chaotic as the last helicopter flights  from Saigon.  But it will be yet another defeat for a once-vaunted army, whose allies have already disembarked  from a doomed campaign.  So what else would Old Tom need for a finale.  Well, let’s not forget his A-bomb song “Who’s next”?  It ends with the lines “We’ll all try to stay serene and calm when Alabama gets the bomb”.  He should be able to come up with a rhyme ending in “an” or “ael”.