The American Way

I was watching the United States play Ghana in their first game of the World Cup.  Ghana has been the team that basically stamped their ticket home from the last two World Cups (2006 and 2010).  The fact that a small African country has been such a bane to the mighty US of A, was a rather stark reminder that we are not the best at everything.  We may be the only remaining superpower, we may dominate the Olympic games in many regards, but in the Beautiful Game, we are still wannabes.
The US won yesterday, but it was ugly.  You got the feeling that Ghana was really the more talented team, but they just couldn't get a break.  That happens in sports sometimes, and it's pretty cool when it breaks in your favor.  Alexei Lalas, who was the red-headed wild man of the US team when they first started making some noise in the 1990's, who is now one of the main soccer talkers on ESPN said that the game was a typical American soccer match: grinding, nail biting, hang on through sheer guts kind of game.  In other words, it was not the Beautiful Game, which is played by the likes of Brazil and Argentina, where there is as much artistry to the play as there is raw athletic talent.
I wonder if Ugly is perhaps the norm for this nation of ours.  Maybe it's new, maybe not so much.  I look at the way things have gone for us on the global stage of late.  Our involvement in Iraq seems to have pretty much come to nothing, as now ISIS, a group that Al-Quaeda thinks is too Fundamentalist, is taking over city after city and waving a torch around a part of the world that is nothing less than a huge powder keg.  We are going to leave Afghanistan, with a mere prayer that somehow the Taliban will not quickly return to power.  We have bled and died in those places, but we may leave with nothing more than some jagged scars.
Our American style: winning through sheer determination and brute force, does not appear to carry the currency that it did in WWII.  Probably because we're not fighting the same enemies. The military actions, from Korea to Afghanistan seem to be trying to teach us that understanding may be more valuable than superior technology and training.
Let's look at Iraq for instance: the Sunni and the Shia have been at each other for centuries.  At different points we have painted the Sunni as the good guys and the Shia as the bad guys, but it's nowhere near that simple.  We liked Saddam Hussein (Sunni) when he was our ally against Khomeni (Shia), but eventually we saw that Saddam wasn't exactly a good dude, so we had to fight him, twice.  All the while Iran was laughing their turbans off and saying, "see we told you so." To us and to all the Sunni who thought that the US was really on their team.
Through it all we have held on to this illusion that the lines drawn in the middle east by colonial powers somehow mean anything.  The nations: Iraq, Iran, Syria, are actually not anything like the Nation that we call home.  They express their patriotism towards tribes and religious sects, not towards the creations of European minds.  That's why they will so readily kill each other, and that's why dictators and supreme rulers of various types can flourish there: because an iron fist is the only way there is going to be peace.
Our policies and procedures in that part of the world have been over matched, like the US Soccer Team taking on Brazil: we might win for a moment but it will have to be ugly and expensive and sooner rather than later the order of things will snap back into place.
Some pretty smart people are saying we need to stay the heck out of there, let them fight it out, let them draw their own lines and try to do things their way.  The downside of that is that a lot of innocent people are going to suffer and die, but that has been a reality with our way as well.
I feel like there are more important wars to wage, like the struggle for equality and human rights, but we absolutely discredit ourselves as humanitarians when we bomb people back into the stone age.
We've shown that we can win ugly, but it's only a momentary victory.  Maybe we need to learn to win beautifully.