It is also a useful trick to keep in mind the opposite of critical thinking - following the herd. Just copying everyone around you is often a great strategy. So good that even if everyone around you are making mistakes it can still be the dominant strategy (there is a reason a lot of people who don't like war are cowed into silence when war fever descends). Most people are using it.
That implies that it is ridiculously easy to be right when everyone else is wrong. People aren't trying to be right. Any sort of principle-based analysis easily outperforms the herd. When leaders in society start lying that is indeed one of those situations. Pretty much any situation where everyone knows something and the hard statistics are telling a different story is.
The more pressing problem is how to go from a lovable Cassandra to someone who can preempt major events and convince the herd to not hurt itself in its confusion. Coincidentally that is how markets work, people who have a habit of being right are given full powers to overrule the mob and just do what they want. Markets don't care if everyone believes something. They care if people who got the calls right last time believe something.
In this case, the US hasn't seen a good outcome to a war since something like WWII and even there they waited until the war was mostly over and the major participants in the European theatres were exhausted before getting involved. The record is pretty bad. Iraq was an easy call to anyone who cares about making accurate predictions.
> That implies that it is ridiculously easy to be right when everyone else is wrong
I think this true but misleading — conditioned on other people going with the herd in the wrong direction, it is easy to be right. However, often the herd is going in a right (or at least acceptable) direction. The continual effort to check if the herd is going in the right direction _is not_ easy. If a magic eight ball could alert you “hey the herd is wrong right now, take a closer look”, that would be great! But we have no such magic eight ball.
> the US hasn't seen a good outcome to a war since something like WWII
Korean War, Panama, and Gulf War were rather successful, resulting in a (more) US-aligned and prosperous South Korea/Panama/Gulf. Without these wars, South Korea wouldn't exist, Panama would probably still be a dictatorship, Saddam Hussein would control Kuwait and the US would have significantly less influence among the GCC.
The Gulf war turned out to be a disaster, it set the US up for 30 years of moral humiliation and strategic degradation in the middle east. They're still fighting the same people, to this day! And slowly going bankrupt Soviet-style because of it. They'd be far better off in a counterfactual universe where they didn't get involved fighting people in the middle east; the Chinese strategy of simply investing the money in domestic industry has been far more effective.
"set the US up" is doing a lot of non-credible rhetorical heavy lifting. In no way did the first Gulf War predetermine the Iraq War, which is what you're trying to insinuate.
I'm going a bit further than insinuating, I think there is a link between the time Bush Sr & Cheney fought Saddam Hussein and the other time Bush Jr and Cheney fought Saddam Hussein. In the same place for largely the same reasons. The events connected. The main difference is as the internet took hold the Bush family had a much harder time covering up the fact that they were ruining their own country and eventually got forced out of presidential politics as the consequences of leaving them in command of the US military became apparent. Thank goodness for that too.
EDIT I saw that deleted comment; bit of a faux pas to respond I know but.. look, there was an invitation for you to cherry pick the most successful US military interventions after WWII. Korea is a great example. Panama too for all I know. But a Bush attacking Saddam Hussein's Iraq is not the hill to plan a defence on, the US policy there used to be one of the top 2 go-tos for US tactical success leading to strategic failure up until the unfolding Trump-Iran episode.
That implies that it is ridiculously easy to be right when everyone else is wrong. People aren't trying to be right. Any sort of principle-based analysis easily outperforms the herd. When leaders in society start lying that is indeed one of those situations. Pretty much any situation where everyone knows something and the hard statistics are telling a different story is.
The more pressing problem is how to go from a lovable Cassandra to someone who can preempt major events and convince the herd to not hurt itself in its confusion. Coincidentally that is how markets work, people who have a habit of being right are given full powers to overrule the mob and just do what they want. Markets don't care if everyone believes something. They care if people who got the calls right last time believe something.
In this case, the US hasn't seen a good outcome to a war since something like WWII and even there they waited until the war was mostly over and the major participants in the European theatres were exhausted before getting involved. The record is pretty bad. Iraq was an easy call to anyone who cares about making accurate predictions.