Originally posted by yrwyddfa
I may have implied that Britain is a more moral nation - but it was unintentional.

All current Western powers have had their grubby hands in some far less well off nation for the benefit of themselves and the detriment to others. All of them. That's how to guidebook describes how to become a 'great' nation. History shames us all.

My point, however ineloquently put, is that the Americans believe in their own rhetoric so much that they simply cannot see the wood for the trees.
I don't get it. You went from saying "Europe wants to go in to avert a massive (in the scale of millions of innocent people) disaster" (which wasn't really true, on the government level) to narrowing it down to just Americans who believe their own rhetoric. To me those are two peas in the same pod sir. ^_^

It is not helped by their own media soliloquy, granted, but still; to utterly believe what is forced fed to you - and then argue for that point of view seems to me to be rather misguided.
It may be that it is a less popular pastime in the American news media audience to armchair-general our government, but there are many openly anti-government anti-establishment anti-what-have-you sources of information. And of course there's the Internet, which not everyone has access to. I wouldn't say people are force-fed their information here. The things I've argued for in this forum are largely substantiated by multiple sources, many of which are international.

And by the same token, many strongly liberal anti-war people, here in this forum and elsewhere, are just as guilty of the behavior you describe. When you ask a person to explain their beliefs to you and they simply can not, that shows (to me anyhow) that they really don't UNDERSTAND the things they believe in. The fact is, a great many people of every belief system choose to take that system completely on faith, from an outside source. Americans aren't especially guilty of this (certainly this forum demonstrates this very clearly).