The Evil of Good Intentions

The British, French, Belgian, and Dutch regimes (in 1917) had all proven themselves to be ruthless imperialists and governments that didn't even give a flying frig about their own soldiers' lives. How any U.S. President could have been so moronic (this, after having already screwed up so stupendously in Mexico TWICE; the U.S.S. Dolphin fiasco and the campaign to hunt down Pancho Villa) as to a) conscript young Americans and throw them into the middle of that grinder and b) actually help these colonial madmen to not only maintain these empires but to expand them is utterly mind-blowing to me. Never will I understand this one, folks.