What you didn't learn in government school...

I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.
-- Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1861

According to John Denson:

The Orwellian historians have falsified the true purposes or motives behind most of America’s wars, and have instead given us glorified accounts designed to mislead the public in order to justify the sacrifices the people have made. All wars, whether won or lost, tend to centralize and increase the power into the national government, increase the debts and taxes and diminish the civil liberties of the citizens. It is time we begin to see through the myths and false propaganda about American wars so that we can prevent future wars. Americans have a strong tendency to accept as true the false wartime propaganda which now appears in the history books and which is repeated by politicians and intellectuals to the effect that all of America’s wars have been just, necessary and noble. This tendency of the Americans to accept this false propaganda tends to prevent them from questioning the alleged reasons for current wars. There is also a strong tendency by Americans to measure a person’s patriotism by how much that person supports an American war rather than how much the person supports the concept of American freedom and the ideas of our Founders, which includes a noninterventionist foreign policy

I must admit, I once fell victim to this type of rhetoric by the President and his propogandists on talk radio, but with the recent revelations about the NSA I have come to a very different conclusion about the motives of this "war" in Iraq.

Lincoln