The USA has lost too many lives and resources trying to "rebuild" other nations. It doesn't work, and it never has.
Much of the economic mess we are crawling out of is due to the "giant credit card swipe" that funded the USA missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The neo-con extremists (such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, et al) and the far right media refuse to admit they were wrong before, and so they see this as an opportunity to be proven right. Again, this deja-vu moment is motivated by a misguided view of the world, where giant corporations profit from our military ventures, while the American people sacrifice their lives and their fortune to add to the profits of the military industrial complex.