Why do Leftists support military intervention in places where there is no strategic or economic value to our country, but oppose such intervention in places where we do have strong interests? Is America's access to the flow of Middle Eastern oil not something worth fighting for? Are the untapped consumer markets in the Arab/Muslim world not our first and best entree to begin the changes there that we all know are necessary to the liberation of those regions?
The Left have an extremely ignorant and hypocritical view of our place in the world and in History. Their idealism often runs ashore on the reality of our own economic imperialism.
After all, what else (besides religious liberty) motivated the exploration and colonization of our own hemisphere? America began as a commercial enterprise. That doesn't make us less valid as a civilization; indeed, our economic power and our liberties and democratic values go hand in hand. They are exportable and influential in ways that not even Rome could have known.
The long journey that George W. Bush has begun is, I believe, one of the most important ones our country will ever take. At the end of it, if any such journey can be said to have an end, is the secularization and incorporation of Muslim civilization into the modern world that we Americans have done so much to create.
The Left may be revolt at the notion of an American-ordered world, but it's one that affords as many opportunities as responsibilities. We cannot avoid our role or misunderstand it.