That phrase just ticks me off whenever used as a knee-jerk excuse for militarism. Look, our Marines and GI's in Iraq aren't "fighting for our freedom". They're fighting for oil, at least indirectly (does anybody think our military would be in Iraq if Iraq didn't have oil? Yeah right, they'd be as much in Iraq as they are in Sudan, i.e., no effin' way!). In fact, the U.S. military hasn't done diddly for "our freedom" since 1945.
Since 1945, the U.S. military has stood around in Germany for Europe's freedom. They've fought in South Korea for South Korea's freedom. They've fought in South Vietnam for South Vietnamese plantation owners' freedom (not for the freedom of the peasants in the countryside ruled by the South Vietnamese dictatorship, of course, they were just peasants and don't count), they've fought in Afghanistan for the warlords' freedom to grow heroin poppies, they've fought in Iraq for oil for Halliburton's freedom to pump some Iraqi tea, they've intervened in Latin American countries at least half a dozen times to fight for United Fruit's freedom to exploit Latino workers, but my freedom? Puh-LEEZE. There is not any nation, any entity, anywhere in the world that threatens my freedom -- well, except the U.S. government and its vast police-state mechanisms of violence including said military, that is.
So here's my promise to you: The next time someone tells me I must support Dear Leader's policies because our soldiers are "fighting for our freedom", I will flog them with limp herring while telling them "no, our soldiers are fighting for Halliburton's freedom -- their freedom to extract Iraqi oil from Iraq and American greenbacks from our pockets, that is." Not that it will work, any Bushbot still extant is too stupid to understand, but it certainly will be satisfying even if a waste of good herring. In the meantime, a good Navy capable of keeping enemy fleets well away from our shores is all we need to defend our "freedom". Anything more than that is a threat to my freedom, not a defense of it, because the U.S. simply does not have any enemies capable of reaching across two big oceans and destroying us, and hasn't since 1945 (even the Soviet Union wasn't capable of doing so except with ICBM's, and we didn't need a big army to counter that -- just lots of ICBM's of our own).
-- Badtux the Herring-lovin' Penguin
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