af_vet_rr, I disagree.
I do believe there ARE valid economic reasons to go to war, and history shows that there are. If a country were to dam and dry up a river that another country downstream depends on for water supply, that would be an economic reason to go to war. Sure, that country could purchase pipelines or truck in water at an extreme cost, but that makes it economic.
If a country is shipping us badly needed oil, and another country attacks their tankers in international water and sinks them, they are not committing an act directly against us, because oil is fungible and theoretically could be purchased and shipped from many places. But what if they decided to sink every tanker leaving a middle eastern port with oil?
I would say there ARE economic reasons to go to war. Where reasonable people disagree, and therein lies the rub, is where does one draw that line along a scale of gray.
As for my reference to Germany and Japan, I don’t believe I am mixing apples and oranges. Actually, there were a huge number of people (and many influential and powerful ones) who thought that we could never get Japan to change and democratize after WWII. They said it was impossible, and would never happen. That was a mainstream view by many, and wasn’t discounted.
If you haven’t read it, I would recommend the book “The Case For Democracy: The Power Of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny And Terror” by Natan Sharansky. I thought he addressed that very subject well in the book.
Will democracy survive after we have left? Perhaps not. Perhaps it may not even survive in this country much longer. There are no guarantees. But as I said before, the difference between a country like the USA and a country like the Soviet Union is clearly evident in our approaches in Afghanistan alone. The fact that we have been there a bit longer than the Soviets, accomplished more of our goals than them but have suffered only suffered less than a fifth of the combat KIA the Soviets suffered did says something. It speaks volumes to the reasons we are there, and most of the people there know it. Even the ones who hate us the most know we aren’t there to colonize the country and take it over, even though they say otherwise for their public consumption.
I wish we did many things better in the conflict, managed it better, but all in all, it has been the right way to approach it.
And by the way, thank you for the rational and polite discourse on this. This is a very polarizing subject, and I have found it difficult engage in on occasion.