Blow back

there is an old saying - no good deed goes unpunished. This expression is about the law of unintended consequences and what is often called blow back in political circles.
When ever you hear some one advocate a policy you must ask the simple question-
what is the worst thing that can happen if it is implemented?
For example when you hear a politician advocate that we get into the middle of some war- either by supporting one side or even sending in troops- you need to ask the following questions.
1.) What is the cause of the conflict and what is happening on the ground. This means looking at articles from outside the mainstream media and and taking everything with an ocean of salt.
The first casualty in war is the truth. Nothing is worse than a false narrative that is used to bring about war.
( so look at antiwar pages like
http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/
http://antiwar.com/
and others
)
2.) What are possible peaceful solutions being suggested- there are some politicians and pundits like Paul Wolferiz , William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, John McCain and others who want to paint every conflict as the Munich accord in 1938- and view themselves as Churchill and who ever wants a peaceful answer as Chamberlain. The problem with this analogy is that it ignores what is happening now.  In my view the only thing worse than a major war that happens because a pacifists made the wrong call would be to have a major call because someone supporting a bellicose interventionist foreign policy made the wrong call. Since in the first- a lot of people died but you tried to prevent it. While the second the deaths could have been prevented- but a peaceful solution was not sought.
We take a look at Ukraine - what started the Ukrainian civil war was the EU and Russia's Eurasian customs union getting into a bidding war over Ukraine. The EU offered an association agreement and future membership provided they underwent some austerity measures in order to get their economic house in order the Russians promised them a major aid package and membership with out any strings.
the people in eastern Ukraine favor ties with Russia and and the west they favor ties with the EU and internal extremest combined with outside influences turned a trade dispute into a civil war.
If I had been in the EU when the Ukrainian government started accepting the Russian offer I would have been taking the approach of lowering trade and travel barriers against the Russian trade union so that both halves of Ukraine would have been able to get what they wanted.
3. ) what is the worse thing that can happen if things go wrong.- for example during the lead up to the Iraq war - I was opposed to it as Saddam Hussein had more or less a secular government and during the first gulf war he had plenty of opportunity to hit coalition troops and Israel with chemical weapons before January 17, 1991 but he did not do so. The simplest explanation in my view was Saddam Hussein believed doing so would possibly result in nuclear retaliation or at least the dismantling of his regime. In short- Saddam may have been simply evil or even crazy but he was not stupid.  Then more recently we have ISIS.  The US has been siding against asaad in the Syrian civil war. This has helped build up ISIS. There are one of two reason this happened- either the Syrian civil war has been a fight between Asaad and ISIS all a long with the US ignoring realities on the ground or ISIS rose to power because they are the most ruthless and well organized group in Syria and have exterminated all third options which are better.  Either way if we had stayed out- Asaad may have crushed ISIS years ago. The lesson here is some times the devil you know is better than the one you don't know.
4.) remember that there will never be utopia as long as the world is governed by fallible humans and there is only so much that anyone can do to combat evil with out being a source of evil oneself or grinding yourself to the ground. Empires tend to fall because they get overstretched and can't afford to defend the frontier. So if you feel you have the duty to intervene everyplace you will fall either from 10,000 paper cuts or one strong blow that you failed to react to as you were tied up with 10,000 pieces of paper.