Contemporary

2004

2010

2011

Tacloban's own evacuation shelter was drowned by the storm surge it was supposed to protect people from, because Typhoon Haiyan's warnings focused on wind speed while the water, not the wind, did almost all the killing.

2015

2001

1995

2004

2016

1991

2010

2003

1993

2011

The United States spent nearly twenty years and thousands of lives removing the Taliban from power in 2001, only to watch them retake the country within weeks of its own withdrawal.

The United States invaded Iraq in 2003 on claims of weapons that were never found, and the power vacuum it left behind produced the Islamic State a decade later.

1999

2003

2005

2004

2017

2002

Myanmar's military government let an American aircraft carrier group sit offshore for weeks with aid it refused to accept, while the storm it was refusing help for had already killed as many people as some entire wars.

2016

2015

2015

2002

A president kept 3,432 hours of his own conversations on tape, and it was that recording system, not the burglars, that eventually brought him down.