Glancing through this thread it appears revisionist history is either stronger than I had thought or there are corporate tools on board who like to confuse people with little knowledge of history.

When a person makes a blanket judgment on liberals there should be a requirement they back it up with some history. Our founders were liberal, FDR was liberal, Truman was liberal, LBJ was liberal, and while Vietnam turned into a quagmire the others won their battles. I know of no conservatives who wanted to fight these early battles. Iraq was an illegal invasion by the standards Americans hold, it is only a war in words. Fighting terrorism with an army is like invading Little Italy over the Mafia or the South over the KKK. I am not sure Afghanistan could be called a war by the classic standards. Today it is a mess due to the administration's bad choices.

Certainly we should not ignore the tyranny and oppression imposed by any regime but military interventionism which brings the tyranny and terrorism of war is not the solution. We should certainly not use our military to support tryannical regimes which is what the US did during the Gulf War. Both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are and have been identified as tyrannical and oppressive regimes by human rights groups worldwide.

It is also a gross misinterpretation of the founding principles of America to believe that Americans ever supported foreign interventionism when tyranny and oppression exists in a country. The Declaration of Independence specifically addresses the subject so I will quote it:

These two sentences clearly establish two separate principles:

People under a tyrannical government are "disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable" so it is the determination of the People under that government which make the decision as to the level of tyranny which they are willing to live under and not outside nations.

And when such abuses become intolerable it "is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government" and not the right or duty of another nation to do so.

There is no doubt that Saddam was a tyrant but the US war against Iraq and invasion and occupation of Iraq by the United States has unquestionably brought more destruction and death than Saddam's regime. The estimates of innocent civilian death toll directly related to the US invasion ranges from 155,000 to over 1 million people. The 155,000 far exceeds the estimated death toll from Saddam during his entire regime and the million possibly dead represents almost 5% of the entire Iraqi population. If we include the international estimates of the Iraqi death toll going back to the start of the war against Iraq by the US in 1991 the related death toll is between 1-2 million Iraqis. Obviously the destruction to the infrastructure of Iraq is extensive and it will take decades for Iraq to rebuild just to reproduce what Iraq was in the 1980's.

While not going into details we can see the same thing happening in Afghanistan.

The point being that no matter how tyrannical a regime might be the invasion of a nation by a foreign nation is far more tyrannical and destructive than the actions of the tyrant. No actions of a tyrant can exceed the death and destruction experienced when that nation is invaded by another nation.

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Soldiers swear to protect and defend the Constitution with their lives.

Politicians swear to protect and defend the Constitution with someone else's life.

I never said anything about supporting tyrannical regimes. And sitting by while one tyrannical regime (Iraq) wages war against another (Kuwait) . But, you cannot influence a government to change their ways peacefully when you are an enemy of them. By engaging in relations with the governments of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the others, the US could influence them to open up more freedoms and eventually embrace a representative form of government. This is not something that can happen if we just sit around and hope they will change by example.
Military intervention has been proven over many decades to be the deciding factor in achieving the goal of peace in many different countries. World War I and II are two often used examples. The 2004 intervention in Haiti. Panama in 1989 is another example. Even the American Colonies during the American Revolution benefited from foreign military intervention.

It would be quite hypocritical of the US to say that people should seek their independence completely on their own with no international assistance when the success of the American Colonies during the American Revolution was entirely based on the foreign intervention of France and Spain.
France deployed a few thousand troops to the Colonies to help in the fight against Britain but their most important military contribution was fighting the British fleet throughout the Atlantic. It became very difficult and, towards the end, basically impossible for the British to reinforce their troops in the Colonies because of the French blockade.
Spain engaged British troops in the South and West of the Colonies and won many crushing victories. They also engaged the British in the Caribbean, and act that led to the withdrawal of British troops from the Colonies because they saw their Caribbean colonies are far more valuable than the American Colonies.
Without the intervention of Spain and France the American Revolution would have been lost and the United States would never have been born.

In 1991, just after the Persian Gulf War, Iraqi Kurds and Shiites rose up against Saddam. The promised US support never came. The US failed the citizens of Iraq and hundreds of thousands were killed by Saddam's forces. Many of whom had not taken part in the uprising. This uprising is proof that the people of Iraq wanted to remove Saddam but they did not have the ability to do so. So in 2003 the US intervened in Iraq much like how the Spanish and French had intervened in the American Colonies.
The death toll between the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War is entirely the fault of Saddam. Many were killed by Saddam's brutal police forces and the UN sanctions were dependent upon Saddam's actions. Had Saddam cleaned up his act then the sanctions could have been lifted, just as they had been for Libya in the 80s. Also, most of the civilians killed in the Iraq War have been killed by insurgents and criminals. The US mission in Iraq is to end the violence created by those groups by patrolling the streets and training the Iraqi police and military so that they will be able to effectively combat the problems on their own.

Afghanistan has been involved in a series of wars since 1979. To say that it is the US bringing war upon Afghanistan is the height of ignorance. These reports of Coalition forces accidentally killing Afghan civilians are very tragic and the US tries very hard to not kill any civilians. But the fact is the Soviets intentionally massacred civilians in the Soviet-Afghan War (around 1 million). Many of the forces in the Afghan Civil War massacred civilians (tens of thousands). And the Taliban massacred civilians (hundreds of thousands).

Afghanistan has been better than it had been in the past 30 years ever since the beginning of the War in Afghanistan.

That is completely untrue. Look at the actions of the US in wars of liberation compared to the actions of the dictators in charge. Repeat the actions of those dictators for every year since those people were liberated. Add in the fact that the US rebuilds the countries to be better than they were before.
The US seeks and desires the minimum possible casualties for US and allied forces and civilians. The US is not a brutal army engaged in wars of conquest like you seem to think they are.

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"We consider this our duty - to defend humanity against the scourge of intolerance, violence, and fanaticism." -Ahmed Shah Massoud
Ahmed Shah Massoud T-Shirt

it's a simple answer really...

War is evil.

War is the pure unbridled result of evil. If war occurs... then politicians have failed in their job. It is the duty of leaders to protect their people. When war occurs, they have failed at protecting their people through the political process...

You can't just go around attacking people because they call you names or say that they hate you...

I think it says it best in the Bible... "THOU SHALL NOT KILL"

War == a whole LOT of killing...

15 of them were called Saudi Arabians. 4 of them were called Egyptians. They were trained and equipped by a Saudi Arabian called Osama bin Laden. Notice I have not mentioned Iraq or Saddam Hussein.

As to the Cole, I don't know where those terrorists were from but it was NOT Iraq. And they were NOT funded by Saddam Hussein.

So now, tell me why we invaded Iraq again??

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One Nation, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice Forever.

A turkey by any other name--is still the governor of Alaska.

Capt. Paul and Sea Shepherd forever!!

LOL we just can't win with these insufferable righties.

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One Nation, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice Forever.

A turkey by any other name--is still the governor of Alaska.

Capt. Paul and Sea Shepherd forever!!