Doug, you are becoming irony-impaired. :)
Provincialism is sad indeed, but don't you think it's the lesser of two evils, compared to the humanitarianism of liberal laptop bombardiers? If most Americans had thought like the dialectical Chris B and the humanitarian Nathan N, we might have seen a worse destruction of Yugoslavia & a deployment of U.S. ground troops, with Washington overcoming the Vietnam syndrome (an American aversion to American casualties). For what it's worth, most Americans thought that their own lives were more important than the U.S. foreign policy (though there is an argument that an anti-war movement might have been more successful if the U.S. had gone further than no-casualty air war [minus the helicopter accident that killed a few Americans & suchlike]). And unlike Brad who doesn't tire of defending the necessity of the Korean War & denouncing the evils of the two Kims, for most Americans, the Korean War probably remains a "Forgotten War," much to the chagrin of the American Legion. In this amnesia, Koreans, Okinawans, etc. do not receive the reparation that they deserve either, but, still, things could be a lot worse if forgetful Americans learned to remember & obsess over the ghosts of Stalin. And despite the efforts of top officials of the AFL-CIO, most Americans don't seem to think that China is the cause of all their woes.
Like I said, the glass is a quarter full. "Provincial ignorance" is better than a quarter-baked knowledge, relatively speaking.
Of course, I'd love it if ordinary Americans rose up and demanded the total withdrawal of U.S. troops from everywhere, for instance, but honestly I don't think such a thing will happen in the near future, and neither do you. And none of us has any clue as to how to make that happen.
Yoshie