I am very much pleased by the good, decent leftists who have taken notice of Ron Paul, and of libertarian ideas in general, and who recognize the common ground we all share on issues of civil liberties and peace.

But then there are the progressive warmongers. These are the folks who cheered on Clinton’s butchery. Some of them thought the Iraq war would lead to liberation. Many if not most of them thought that even if the US had made a huge mess of invading, it couldn’t just leave. No, the US would have to maintain the occupation. The arrogant idea was that the US could possibly improve things by staying — that the American government could liberate and bring hope and education and health care to the Iraqi people.These progressive warmongers are in some ways the worst of the hawks. They are second only to the aggressive conservatives who would think nothing of nuking millions of Arabs and Muslims in an act of premeditated, cold-blooded, national socialist mass murder. But the progressives are a close second, since they have the arrogance to think the US government can go abroad and bring freedom, democracy and assistance to everyone all over the planet. They are the type who supported McKinley’s war on the Cuban and Philippine people. They are the type who rallied around Wilson as he waged war to make the world safe for hypocrisy. They are the type who supported the early Cold War. They are the type who think Ron Paul’s “isolationism” is immoral and instead would prefer another Clinton in the White House, one who will use her female intuition to refine the American war machine and direct it to ever more “humanitarian” ends.

Well, for all you who didn’t want to leave Iraq right away, out of some American-supremacist belief that the US occupation was in the best interest of the Iraqi people and “we” owed it to “them,” all I can say is: Shame on you. Hundreds of thousands have died since the invasion. It could have been much less, but you gave our imperialist government the public support it needed to keep slaughtering in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity.

This isn’t just Bush’s war. This is your war too. You inherited some responsibility for American imperialism and the hate it generates abroad every time you cheered on Clinton’s wars against “genocide” and for “international peace” and let your false pride in American imperialism triumph over even your reactive partisanship for long enough to support the murder of individual Afghans and Iraqis for the greater good of their societies.

It was your foreign policy that brought on the 9/11 attacks just as much as it was the rightwing’s. Those of you on the “left” who can’t even get it through your heads that the warfare state should never be trusted are less than useless. You only play into the hawkish paleoconservative, theoconservative, neoconservative hands — the rightwing forces who waged murderous wars against countless innocent people in the name of fighting communists, atheists and terrorists. Except your utopian and naive vision is worse. It is essentially the socialist vision that starved millions in trying to bring them equal portions of grain. It is the ideology that led to 100 million deaths in the last century. Your warmongering is no better than Bush’s, and if you think Hillary will warm over international alliances better than Bush, will wage wars and impose American values on foreign cultures better than Bush — well, that just shows your priority isn’t peace at all. What you want is an American empire than everyone around the world fears and respects, and you are only upset at the current president because he’s made it harder for the US government to push people around and get away with it.