[...] The famous go-to-war-for “American way of life,” [...] underlines America’s persistent claims of a monopoly on morality. What is it, this American morality? This righteousness? Is it our religious roots in the fable of the Puritan settlers, those super religious people who in their hardships were bigots, perhaps also practitioners of incest and racists soon morphing into dogmatic chauvinists who early-on labeled their dissidents and different-thinkers witches and demons. [...] The same Americanism initiated then which today fosters the rights of the rich to become richer, the strong to trample the weak [...].
Meanwhile, out in the empire, as long as it is distant, the Puritan legacy instills blindness to the use of cluster bombs from the stratosphere and hidden torture in places with foreign names like Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib . . . and while our neighbors in Haiti eat dirt, literally.

And what does any war of the last 50 years have to do with the myth of "defending our freedom"?