If you believe that summary executions by bombings or drone strikes is acceptable, despite the innocent lives that such acts snuff out of existence, you are not a liberal. Liberals oppose the taking of innocent human lives. Anything else is convenient moral expediency - aka warmongering. Supporting these things is a luxury only enjoyed by those who do not live under the threat of being bombarded. Supporting the use of air strikes and bombardments to take out enemy targets with no regard to civilian casualties is what you do when you are a privileged American or Northern Hemisphere Western world citizen who, by right of technological dominance, will never be the target of such acts of mass murder. If you support summary executions and drone strikes, you do so because your child will never die for the simple crime of being an innocent bystander. You live under the safety of the protection of due process: before you or anyone you know can be put to death there must be a trial and the discovery of evidence, and a jury that convicts you and sentences you to die. For you to say that people in the rest of the world don't deserve the same exact thing, makes you no better than the so-called terrorists. You are not a liberal if you believe in summary executions or drone strikes. Period.
If you believe that America should in any way be involved in the Middle East, you are not a liberal. What we are doing out there is nothing short of the naked mass exploitation of natural resources in the name of protecting an outdated energy industry that is killing us all. So you say we need the oil? Do you also say we need the pollution and the global warming that comes with the burning of these fossil fuels? Do you believe the fossil fuel industry propaganda about how alternative fuels and energy aren't practical? Then you most certainly aren't a liberal, because you are clinging to outdated concepts that are going to lead to disaster for human civilization. Do you deny that burning fossil fuels is causing global warming and is causing the costly, outright disastrous droughts and floods that we are seeing today? Is your counter argument "but things will cost more if we don't stick with oil"? Then you are in fact a conservative, not a liberal, and moreover, you have a nasty surprise coming to you: global warming is already making things cost more... like food.
Do you say we also need to maintain a military presence in the Middle East to fight with people in the area who don't want us there? Do you argue that we have a right to be there because their governments - largely un-elected dictatorships that they are - invited us to be there? Such naked Imperialism is not liberalism - in fact it is the exact opposite, it is conservatism. You have the privilege of adopting this conservative warmongering mindset because you live in a safe Western nation where foreign troops don't routinely drive through your streets, shooting at your neighbors. If you were a liberal you would be fighting for the right of Middle Easterners to enjoy the same privileges. Oh but they're terrorists, you argue? Another bigoted conservative belief. Try having unwanted foreign troops in your city and see how fast your neighbors start taking up arms against them. If you were a liberal you'd understand the hypocrisy of this so-called "war on terror".
Does this sound like ideological purity? You betcha it does. The alternative is that liberalism will be re-defined as blind loyalty to old outdated industries with reckless disregard to the damage being done to our environment. The alternative is signing onto an ideology that saddles our children with an even more polluted world, for the sake of immediate economic gain for our generation. The alternative to the dreaded concept of ideological purity is to accept that liberalism has evolved into naked imperialism, racism and mass-murderous savagery repackaged as "bringing democracy and civilization to the East".
If you support drone strikes, Middle East intervention and resource exploitation, and the war on terror, you are not a liberal. There is already a home for your beliefs, and it is called conservatism.
