We do not.  However, the last time we did not wait, the left demonized the action (Iraq).  Obama is no Bush in that respect.  He is a coward in dealing with international issues as has been demonstrated multiple times.

I doubt we will "act" again any time soon as the left loves to demonize war - no matter the reason for it.  If they had been in charge in 1941, we would be speaking german now.

The U.S. Intervenes and we're criticized for manipulating foreign governments. Other foreign governments don't intervene and we're criticized for not getting the ball rolling. We act unilaterally and we're called arrogant and destabilizing. The world wants to have us act when there is a price to pay and also demands an on off switch so they have control on when and where we do. Now you know why Europe has had so many wars on it's continent over the centuries. Every nation wants an advantage but doesn't want any other nation to have one. We are fools to try to accommodate them. We should help when it's the right thing to do and ignore the peanut gallery when we do so. Unfortunately it takes conviction and principle an leadership to this and most American "leaders" now lack those qualities.

The U.N. always fiddles and who's lying?

That's spectacular ignorance worthy of Glen Beck. Both our declared wars in the 20th century were the product of Democratic majorities in Congress and administered by Democratic presidents. In 1941, they were freakin' New Deal Democrats. Gah! Even our last big debacle of a misguided war was almost entirely the responsibility of Democratic leaders, although LBJ & friends managed to avoid busting the treasury, unlike Bush 43 & friends.

You're woefully ignorant if you assume that what passes for 'the left' in the U.S. is dominated by pacifists. First, we have no real left, just molly-coddlers who have yet to recover from the Regan era. Second, Jimmy Carter is the closest thing we've had to an 'anti-war' president (Obama's rhetoric is anti-war, but his policy is obviously closer to some neo-real-politik mutant thing). Clinton threw our military weight around just as freely as Reagan or Bush 41, he just tried for different spin because he wanted to keep the real anti-war folks deluded enough to keep supporting him.

Some worthy considerations on this subject here.

Most citizens vehemently opposed getting involved in "foreign wars" before Pearl Harbor, and before Pearl Harbor the GOP included many leading isolationists. For better or worse, it was Democratic leadership that broke the tradition of isolationism that held more or less from the founding to WW I.

The 'contempt for disagreement' thing is certainly no Democratic monopoly. Your Stalin/Mao line applies equally well to the attitude the Bush 43 administration took towards those of us who disagreed with the decision to invade Iraq. Because they refused to go the legal route and ask for a formal declaration of war, they used a lily-livered Congress to force that war on our uniformed services and taxpayers.

Wow, look at all the neocons!

The UN is fiddling because the UN can do nothing but fiddle. The UN was specifically designed to be ineffectual by the large powers of the WWII era, and was based on the idea that a US-EU-USSR-PRC alliance would remain in effect in perpetuity (which obviously didn't happen). I also find it ironic that the conservatives who so often scream about the UN doing nothing are also the ones who seem to be the most afraid of ever giving it any real power. You can't have it both ways.

I in theory support a no-fly zone over Libya, but pretty much every time the US sends the big men with big guns and little accountability in to do "something", it gets botched and they end up doing more harm than good. Qaddafi is a brute and the rebels need all the help they can get, but I simply don't trust the Air Force to properly "liberate" anything more complicated than a photo op.

No, working on getting potassium"iodide" pills for the world.

This is why political parties suck; they lead to an us versus them mentality. When one party takes a position the other will oppose it as a matter of course. Benjamin Franklin was right.

Those are not mutually exclusive, and if you are talking in terms of the Tea Party-captured part of the dear old GOP, it is not an ideal but an evil, or at best an excessive drain on the public treasury.

Most certainly. A healthy democracy is nothing but the results of ongoing arguments such as this. As a Duchamp-loving new son of the Old South in the U.S., I deeply cherish having a toilet to call my own. The thing is, we depend on far more than commodious plumbing to enjoy our luxurious 'middle class' lifestyles.

Free market zealots refuse to admit that those boundaries are fundamentally a matter of ongoing debate in a healthy democratic polity. I don't know if you're a free market zealot, but I'm not an anti-market zealot. I don't expect to pay for your personal toilet, nor for anyone to pay for mine. But, I do expect whatever taxes I manage to pay to help provide for public toilets in many locations; they're good for private dignity and public health.

Even 'free market zealots' shit like the rest of us and recognize the benefits of communal solutions to certain problems.  The tension comes from the incremental, but relentless, push to define more and more activities and functions as 'problems' requiring communal/governmental 'solutions'.

What frustrates me is the simplistic notion, perpetuated ad nauseum by much of what passes for the press here, that the 'correct' position, on virtually any issue, is somewhere in the 'middle' between 'right' and 'left', a view that is completely devoid of consideration of principle.  Some of the more important things we tussle over in a representative republic are all or none propositions - you can't be 'slightly' pregnant; sometimes the 'opposing' views are quite incompatible and not subject to the kind of forced 'compromise' the press is so fond of.

You make me wish I knew a three-part analog to the pot-kettle metaphor. Tall order, that. Worst sort of problem for a peace-loving citizen who values a civic-minded officer corps. Maybe not all that easy for conflict-loving citizens, either.