Are you really saying that we didn't stop this war because we lack 'moral authority'? We lack actual authority, which means that various wonderful plans we might imagine to encourage democratic flowering in our own country and even in neighboring countries are dead letters. If anything, there's too much utopian imagining about how the U.S. could 'help' people in other countries and not enough discussion of how to put in place a government here that won't level said countries, and I don't mean elect Democrats.
Jenny Brown