Also a good and thoughtful post.

Just a couple of points:

Our interference in Iran during the Shah era, ill-advised or not, was IMO more about keeping the Soviet Union out of the Mideast (using our old "better-a-thug-than-a-communist" theory) than about keeping oil prices down, although had the Soviet Union taken over the Middle East, one can bet that oil prices would eventually have become an issue.

Politics were the issue more than profits.

Right now there is a US installed Afghan president. He needs to be protected by US Special Forces. Why?



Do you think the Afghans would like that any more than if the French installed a US president and protected him/her with the Foreign Legion? Would you remember that? Not the protection, but that he/she was unpopular and had to be protected? (That's not "democracy", BTW.)



If the American government was murdering American citizens wholesale, using soccer stadiums as killing fields, institutionalizing the brutalizing of women, reducing the nation to starvation, and harboring an international terrorist group, I might not be all that displeased with the French rolling down the Mall in tanks and installing a new government. The last time American tanks rolled down French streets for a similar reason, the response was quite positive as I recall.

The Afghan president needs protection because he is targeted by an enemy armed force which still has people in Afghanistan, not because he is hated by the general public.