[Chris Alger]

"Those words mean very specific things."

Perhaps they should but the propaganda apparatus has turned them into buzzwords. "Terrorism," for example, is by definition something the U.S. never does (at least, not any more). So it doesn't make any difference that key officials implicated in contra terror remain in government, presumably part of the "war on terror," which would mean war on themselves if the word had any substance. As for "democracy," the often translates into "propping up pro-American autocracies." The U.S. gives military and police aid to help the house of Saud maintain its chokehold over Arabia and calls it "promoting democracy in the Middle East."

[ QUOTE ]
Proponents of the war don't deny these things, they just see a greater good behind them.

[/ QUOTE ]
They don't "see" any greater good they just hear the President or the MSM assert it and accept it as gospel. For what "greater good," for example, did the U.S. help turn Latin America's oldest democracy into a brutal military dictatorship replete with all the characteristics of a fascist takeover? Further, if you alter this question and ask the average war supporter if it happened at all, my guess is that they'd have no knowledge of it. And the ones that do invoke the same crude utilitarianism you do, the same line used by Stalinists and promoters of Victorian workhouses. Of course, when it comes to their own objects of contempt (like the terrorism they don't like), utilitarianism goes out the window, replaced by the lofty rhetoric of bright-line moral supremacy.