I guess we shouldn't have been involved in Korea, Kosovo, and Haiti either.

When you use "we" are you referring to US troops, in general, or the National Guard?

I didn't say anything against our regular troop's involvement in any war--just that my friends and I didn't conceive of the Guard as part of our standing army while we were growing up.

I agree with the last paragraph of that history section I posted--that the current use of citizens to defend our nation is more in line with our framers' notions of what type of militia we would prefer. That is, we ought not have an industrial military complex that interacts with corporate interests to manuever a free nation into wars abroad for the economic elites' interest.

I'm not opposed to using the Guard for defense, but I don't think we should have a standing army that fights wars abroad. I'm willing to endure attacks and respond to them as they occur if it means that we no longer meddle in the affairs of sovereign nations. Even if we haven't really believed it, this is the ideology that has guided our nation from its inception--that ensuring democratic notions sometimes means that we can't pre-emptively stop a harm from occurring, even when we believe it to be present.

Well, several things are being mixed together;

- The purpose of the National Guard
- Whether or not the National Guard is the "militia" (it is one half of the militia as defined in US code, the informal militia being the other half)
- Overall US foreign policy (Isolationism vs Engagement)

I agree that the National Guard was first envisioned as just that, a force of citizen soldiers to guard the country and that it has changed. I also think that the National Guard has become the defacto standing army for the US and that founders had a serious aversion to standing armies (rightly so)