Mike: I don't know any liberal who didn't believe that Saddam was an asshole sonofabitch who should be lock away forever, but few of us thought that we should go kill several hundred thousand Iraqis, some 4000 Americans troops and throw away however many trillion dollars we've spent/will spend just to give Al Queda another and better training ground against us.
Eric: I share your sense of the mystery of fate. Take it back a couple notches. Get your zoot suit out. It's the age of radio.
Liberals believed that Hitler was a sonofabitch who should be stopped. However, few Liberals thought the US should unwittingly establish a bipartite geopolitics of Thermonuclear Cold War with millions of people killed in proxy wars, and billions held hostage, for forty years.
When it became abundantly clear that the US had emerged from WW2 with all kinds of unwanted responsibilities --and more!-- had been forced into a thermonuclear death struggle with the USSR, most Liberals didn't mind at all. Oops, big change. Let's adapt.
Most but not all. Some Liberals balked at the unintended consequences WW2 rammed onto the US. Those ideologically purer and less practical Liberals became Progressives, were led by FDR's VP before Truman (name escapes me), and inspired a lot of great folk songs.
In short, the argument is an indictment of outcome, the perquisite of hindsight, the old woulda-coulda-shoulda of selective discontent.
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