“By the way, do you support the “Clinton Doctrine” of “humanitarian warfare?””
By humanitarian warfare I guess you mean peacekeeping?
Nope
“Do you think our sons and daughters in America’s military forces should be sent overseas to build sewers and electrical lines for Iraq?”
Contractors are building them for the most part.
But there are some deployments of engineer units to places such as South America where they get to use their training and equipment in a real world mission.
Now deployments like I just mentioned I do not see a problem with for the following reasons:
1.) It’s training and it’s not just for the engineer unit either, because you’ll have sea and airlift specialists, personnel specialists, medics, etc all doing their part too.
2.) It gives our troops exposure to other cultures that they may never see otherwise.
3.) It improves our image
But the biggest thing is training because these engineer units will be able to go out and use their skills and equipment to the fullest extent which is something that doesn’t always happen back stateside.
Half my town is still on septic tanks. Now admittedly, there's not sewage running in the streets like there has been in Fallujah for the last five thousand years, but I wouldn't mind a $200 million project by the Army Corps of Engineers to pay for sewer line extensions and hookups here in town if they need training and experience.
Exposure to other cultures? They could get that in the Peace Corps, or on vacations that are paid for out of their own pockets, instead of mine. The extent of our military forces' understanding of other cultures should be how most efficiently to bomb them into surrendering. That's what the military is supposed to be for, after all, not "improving our image."
But I find it interesting that you mention that our image might need improving. Listening to everyone around here you'd think that they just "hate our freedom" or something like that.