In the middle of a good review of two rightwing revisionist books about the War on Vietnam, Rick Perlstein says something profound but obvious:
And yet, in his own confused way, Moyar is also onto something. Americans, even “neoconservative” ones, are prone to liberal sentimentalizing about the possibility of “good” wars. But war is not good. War is the attempt of one group to violently impose its will on another. Fields of blood and fire are no kind of workshop for Jeffersonian democracy.
Yet nonetheless quite a few people who would say of themselves that they are of the left, and I’m not just talking about Decentists, have this illusion that it is possible to wage war for democracy, or human rights. Hence Kosovo, Afghanistan and, to a certain extent, Iraq. In all cases war supporting leftists were not the ones who made these wars possible, but helped legitimise them by providing non-official (and non-binding!) motivations for supporting them.