Whoever voted for that pig of a bill explicitly voted to authorize a preventive war.  Hillary voted against most and Edwards voted against all amendments designed to restrain Bush's authority to wage war to situations involving an imminent threat.

It's a contradiction in terms, like "moral neo-con."  You can't display both qualities.

After all, being a liberal hawk meant you didn't pay any attention to the fact that everyone was lying about Iraq.  No matter what my political philosophy, the fact that Mr. Bush and Colin Powell were caught lying repeatedly would have caused me to question their motivation.  Since Mr. Bush already had a long record of being a liar and a corrupt incompetent, I integrated those facts, along with the fact that he was lying about Iraq, and I came to the obvious conclusion that it wasn't a good idea.

It still boggles me that others couldn't do the math.  This isn't adding two and two, this is counting to four on your fingers. (To prevent the obvious troll talking point, I am aware that a number of prominent Democrats cough*Hillary*cough are similarly incapable of counting on their fingers.)

We have become a political body almost biologically incapable of thinking creatively.  

That said, I don't really understand how you could have thought Vietnam defensible anymore than Iraq is.  Vietnam was even LESS of a threat to us than Iraq, which was almost none.  Vietnam had been colonized and had experienced the starvation genocide of the French, and we had less than no reason to think we could do ANYthing militarily successful there.  Again, creativity and imagination would've dictated we respond to all those letters from Ho Chi Minh with "We do not agree with the political system you want to go with, but we realize we have been on the side of terrible wrong for decades, and that you have no reason to trust us.  We wish to help you economically, intellectually, technologically, and will do our best to overcome our differences with you in a manner beneficial to both our people's."  

Instead, we butchered our way to failure and disgrace.

And supported a war against the Taliban is one thing, supporting THIS war against them, when you had no reason to believe Bush capable, well, you get what you support I suppose.

For about the past half century or so....

Does anyone seriously believe that the Iraq War is a defensive war against an enemy that struck us or would have struck us?

Most Americans now realize that using 19 hijackers armed with knives or box cutters as a pretext for a war in Iraq or for trillions of dollars of additional defense expenditures makes no sense and is about as honest as was the case for war. The terrorists have no submarines, planes, or armies. Yet, a small group of fanatics with small arms has been used to justify some $5,000 per taxpayer per year in military expenditures. It is likely that the war in Iraq will cost each taxpayer about $15,000 above that.

Militarism not only invites military solutions to diplomatic problems, but also destroys the economic dreams of countless families and ultimately sabotages our entire economy...

Now here is my question, when did it become foreign policy orthodoxy, as opposed to neocon insanity, that this is not the norm?

When Americans became convinced that their country could do whatever they wanted because they could beat anybody up. Let's face it, if the invasion of Iraq had succeeded, in the sense that the US forces controlled the country, and successfully installed a puppet government that handed over the oil to US companies, there wouldn't be any of this soul-searching going on.

Apparently the only way Americans can begin to think about cooperating with other countries, and negotiating with rivals, is when they actually try to beat someone up, and fail. Like now.

Carroll's "House of War" is excellent for how this all got ginned up over the decades after WWII.

Chalmers Johnson's trilogy beginning with "Blowback" is also a must read.

And you must get educate yourself on Vietnam.  How we paid to prop up the French colony after WWII, what we did when the French hung it up, like prevent the national reunification referendum in accordance with the Geneva Accords, the series of corrupt dictators that we supported and in the case of Diem got rid of when he didn't behave, ect.  Two million Vietnamese did not have to die because we had some pathological fear of communism .