Courage and Liberalism

Hi, I haven't posted in a long time, and I don't know if I'm about to begin posting regularly again, but I've just changed the description-box text and want to address the issue at greater length. In the description box I note that a number of 'liberals' have behaved as if I were not a 'true' liberal because I did not continue protesting the war after the invasion of Iraq began. The truly liberal position regarding Iraq and Afghanistan is that once you fight a war somewhere, however good or bad the reasons for starting it in the first place, you are obliged to rebuild what you destroyed for both moral AND self-interested reasons. Not rebuilding Afghanistan in the 80s is the whole reason we are there again now. Furthermore, it is just SAD that its become the "liberal" position that we ought to abandon these people to their fates just because of the absurd notion that all war is unwarranted aggression. You do NOT always get to be the one who chooses when violence takes place. Just because you make a show of not wanting to fight is no guarantee that someone else in the world will oblige you. If you choose not to fight when someone more selfish than yourself is using any means of coercion necessary to get what they want it doesn't make you more high-minded or more civilized or smarter or better or more admirable than that person, it makes you a fucking coward. "They that can give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin The worst part of this whole thing is that, in the twentieth century, liberals had the sense to actually stick to the proven track record of Keynesian economics in post war occupation periods. We invested in rebuilding Europe and Japan with the Marshall Plan and today both are thriving economies, in temporary downturns due to their insane turns toward "supply" side economics, but still in solid position clearly traceable to our investment in their futures. Now, we've decided that its all just too hard. Its too hard to explain Keynes and its too hard to fight. The way it looks is that, when it was WHITE people whose roads and power stations and airports we were rebuilding it all made sense and we were fine with it, but now that its a bunch of BROWN people, we can't be bothered to spend American lives on investment in their (and OUR!!!) security. THAT has somehow become the LIBERAL position. Are you fucking joking? One more quick thing, so-called liberals whine that there is no clear path to victory, that there is no clear GOAL to the war in Afghanistan. Funny, I could have sworn that the GOAL was peace and that the ABUNDANTLY CLEAR PATH to the peace is to rebuild the functioning nation that we've SCOURED FROM THE FACE OF THE EARTH over fifty years of warfare there. Not us exclusively, mind, but we were responsible for the proxy war there that the Soviets brought, so it amounts to the same thing. Will we be fighting to build that nation through IED explosions and continuing loss of life? Well, yes, that's the whole issue, THERE'S IED EXPLOSIONS GOING ON AND ITS OUR JOB TO STOP THEM, you fucking tools. IED explosions are the physical manifestation of a social problem and we can only eradicate the physical symptom by addressing the underlying disease, not by running away from it. If we do, we'll only be watching helplessly in Afghanistan fifty years from now the way we are in Syria today. Sad libs, just sad.