Okay, Stiggie:

America has been in some few wars in the past hundred years and more, right? On which side did we enter every war -- the side of greater and weightier, more oppressive government, or the side of liberty and governance that did not overween?

1898, the Spanish-American War -- allied with an insurgency of Cubans, against a moribund and thoroughly inefficient empire of the classically imperialist mode -- not an outfit that promoted civil liberties. We acquired, most notably, the Philippines -- and gave it to its native-born fifty years later.

1917, our entry into WW1 -- allied with Britain, Belgium, France, and incidentally Italy, against the Central Powers. And were the Central powers a great bastion of liberty and libertarian thinking? Hell no.

The "banana wars" of the twenties and thirties weren't much of a who's-better situation on either side, and none lasted long enough for moral contests to emerge along with martial contention.

1939-45, WW2: Allied with democracies and constitutional monarchies against three totalitarian regimes. Well known, and enough said.

1950, Korea: nascent and impure democracy south of the 38th Parallel, an unmistakeable Communist totalitarian state north of it, against which we fought. Refugees went SOUTH, not north. Had we been allowed to win, how much of the North would now prosper? Remember the Korean peninsula nighttime satellite photo. It tells you *everything.*

1965, Vietnam: same story, different parallel, even if the democracy wasn't particularly to be found in the Diem, Ky, or Thieu governments, for even less was to be found under Ho. One could blame the French, I suppose. You have to assess the goodness or lack of it of any given regime by how many refugees it generates, Stiggy. There weren't any from Diem, Ky, or Thieu, but a couple million Vietnamese fled south from the Hanoi government, and another couple million fled Vietnam entirely after 1973 when the totalitarian evildoers triumphed. What does it say of a regime that people would take to the sea in drifting rafts risking death by thirst and rape by pirates *in preference to* continuing to reside in the country of their birth? That said totalitarian evildoers were not entirely stupid is demonstrated by their abandoning Marxism, except as a sort of state religion, around 1983.

1961, Bay of Pigs, Cuba: against a declared Communist totalitarian dictator, no? Led fairly directly to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which put us in direct confrontation with another Communist totalitarian dictator.

It is our instinct to oppose oppressors.

Panama and Grenada: neither of our opponents in either case were at all about human liberty, were they?

And who did we ship the Stinger missiles to in Afghanistan? Somehow I don't think it was to the Soviets. For that matter, can *anyone* chain up the Afghans on their home ground? The record says no. Those boys do a very practical job of staying free.

Iraq, Chapters One and Two -- technically and legally, both brawls with Iraq are the same war, albeit one put on pause for eleven years if you ignore all the missiles Saddam's crew wasted shooting in the general direction of coalition aircraft. There was never a peace treaty, only a cease-fire. All this yelling about the Iraq war being illegal -- or even a separate war from Afghanistan -- is without any foundation, and a classic example of leftists trying The Big Lie -- to impair humanity's cause. Perhaps if we spanked the leftists, they'd stop it -- they tend not to be courageous.

So really, Stigweard, the only reason I can see for you to allege laughter is your own ignorance and your want of enthusiasm for the best of all likely systems of governance -- democracy, with liberal individual liberty. This ignorance and want puts you at one with some of the most objectionable men that ever left the womb -- the Pol Pots, the Hitlers, the Stalins. In a non-democracy, a sociopath may go far. Democracies filter them out of the political picture, and a good thing too!