It has never been clear the degree to which the failures of those military campaigns has been caused by incompetence, and how much by complicity.
It is not clear that we are purchasing much more than complicity in government corruption — which, given what foreign aid really could buy in much of the world, and the political scorn those efforts attract, is tragic.
The main subject of The Feast Of The Goat is perhaps not the dictator as much as the complicity of his subjects, and the abiding temptation to choose the strongman, the caudillo.
It was not until Jacques Chirac became president in 1995 that the French state accepted its official complicity, prompting much soul-searching over collaboration, memory and guilt.That makes the reaction to the recent release of "La Rafle" curious.
Racism against blacks depends, in some part, on Asian complicity, as much as it relies (to paraphrase the writer Frank Guan) on the willingness of self-satisfied middle-class white liberals to pass the buck to "white trash".
We know of at least 10 cases, but the complicity probably runs much deeper because it involves a series of terrorism suspects who are Pakistani.
Shouldn't we instead be looking at our own complicity in investing so much power in one man?
Never, in the years he headed the Catholic Church in Argentina, did he acknowledge its complicity in the dictatorship, much less ask for forgiveness.
Worse yet, Lebanon's newly elected government lobbied the UN to investigate and try Mr Hariri's murderers; accumulating evidence pointed to Syrian complicity.Things were not much better at home.
Some Kirchner supporters have accused Bergoglio, like much of the Church in Argentina, of complicity in the bloody military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1976 to 1983.
