[BirdOPrey5]

EDIT: Marco- I started writing this post before your post (yes it took over 30 minutes because I was distracted) but I hope you don't consider this political in any case.

America does not like war... yeah you have some crazy sicko's out there who just like to kill and find their outlet in the Military- but from both personal experience and internal military news sources the VAST majority of US Soldiers would like nothing better than to maintain the peace rather than wage war. War is HELL and no one knows that better than a soldier. Most military men (and women) have families and want to get back to them alive and with all the arms and legs they had before they left.

So yes, we all WANT peace... the problem is that there are forces in this world who genuinely don't want peace. I can't even blame some terrorists for hating America and the Western world... Truth be told they got the raw end of the stick over the last 200 years. Now some blame lies with themselves for being either too entrenched into ancient religious beliefs and/or allowing themselves to be governed by brutal warlords and tyrants rather than modern democracies that evolved elsewhere in the world... but regardless of how or why we got to where we are it doesn't change the facts right now. The facts are there are people willing to kill themselves to kill us... there are people willing to strap bombs to their kids to kill us.

It can be strongly argued through the Bill Clinton Presidency America "stepped back" from around the world- our Military was cut and although we were being attacked by "terrorists" and Saddam Hussein we never really fought back other than fire a well placed missile at a public target. And for a long time this course of action looked like it could work- we were saving a lot of money and we were willing to accept occasional loses to military targets and embassies in far off lands. But on 9/11 when things hit home we learned in just a couple hours that we could not continue to ignore the world.

History teaches us what happens when the world refuses to be aggressive with aggressors. Without American intervention it was a real risk Saddam Hussein would have conquered Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the rest of the Arabian Peninsular, and then Iran and who knows what after that. No doubt through all this there would have been genocide of those throughout his empire he didn't like, like he had already done in Iraq itself.

The Taliban was another "government" that was certifiably crazy with delusions of world domination. Just a few months before 9/11 the Taliban raised my personal red flags when I read a new article about how they used tanks to destroy thousand+ year old carvings of Buddah or something like that made into the cliff-sides of the canyon walls. This would be the equivalent of Egypt destroying the Pyramids because they aren't Islamic in origin. I realized then that this was a festering wound allowed to grow too big we'd soon need to deal with, though I never expected how soon but it was obvious to anyone paying attention they'd be problem for the world as a whole.

So please don't confuse America's willingness to fight the enemy as America's desire for war. It may seem like one and the same to outsiders, it is probably even reported in such a way by international media to promote such thinking, but it is certainly not true.