You make a lot of good points, but it is naive to believe that Korea and Viet Nam, along with other hotspots in Asia and the Americas, had nothing to do with the ambitions of China and the Soviet Union.

Had the Korean conflict been left entirely alone, do you have any doubt that all of Korea would now be part of that human anthill that is North Korea? Do you really think that North Vietnam had nothing to do with Soviet expansionism?

Did we do the right thing in these conflicts to keep the communists in line? Did we waste lives for nothing? Should we have left them all alone and stayed home? Would the Soviets have overextended themselves and crapped out their pathetic economic system trying to hold too much territory together, or would we have wound up looking at Russian missile emplacements in Mexico? These are points which can be debated endlessly, without easy answers.

But it's not true that we were just dealing with little civil wars here. The communists, particularly the Soviet Union, had the specific ambition of taking over the planet, and pushed into many nations with this goal in mind. Pretending it ain't so isn't going to change anything.

If the Left had it's way, every conflict the U.S. ever engaged in back to the Revolution would be rewritten as the result of the ambitions of Evil Amerikan Corporations. Obviously we fought World War II because General Motors didn't like the idea of having to compete with Volkswagen.