The United States has a moral obligation to mitigate international conflicts

== Burden of Proof/Resolutional Analysis ==My opponent continues to maintain that he doesn't have to defend that we will intervene in cases where it might go wrong. He attempts to do so in two ways:(1) Mitigation means the intervention succeeded My opponent shouldn't be allowed to limit the resolution to interventions that actually succeeded in mitigating the conflict for three reasons. First, at the time the decision to intervene is made, the decision-maker does not know whether the intervention will succeed, and the resolution places us in the shoes of actual decision-makers. Second, just because we are morally obligated to do something does not mean we will succeed in doing it. I may be morally obligated to save a child from drowning if I encounter a drowning child, but my rescue attempt might fail. I might be halfway to the child when he succumbs and drowns. Third, debate theory does not allow a debater to fiat solvency, which means that a debater cannot say, "I argue that if we intervene, you must assume that it works." The reason debaters cannot fiat solvency is because debate is about real world events, and in the real world, you cannot simply assume that all your interventions succeed.My opponent himself shows how stupid and unfair his resolutional interpretation is. He rejects interventions like the war in Iraq because they failed to mitigate. So he refuses to defend any bad example of intervention. Not only is this absurd, but it's not entirely true. After spending trillions of dollars, Iraq is slightly better off than they were when we first entered. Violence between Sunnis and Shi'ites has been mitigated a bit. But the war was still really expensive and probably, on balance, a very bad idea.Conclusion: we don't make decisions in hindsight, so my opponent cannot define the obligation to mean that we should only intervene when we know - with hindsight bias - that mitigation will succeed.(2) International conflicts means "two or more" so Pro only has defend two interventionsThis argument is absurd. My opponent concedes my argument that if the resolution were: "I am morally obligated to save a child from drowning," that even if the resolution is singular, the obligation applies whenever I encounter a drowning child. The fact that the resolution contains a plural object of the moral obligation just means it is even more likely that the obligation apples in all instances. If the resolution were, "I am morally obligated to save children from drowning," this wording just implies even more strongly that the obligation applies in all circumstances. The fact that the topic drafters (since this is an LD topic which is worded very carefully) chose to make "conflicts" plural rather than singular means that they contemplated this very scenario and wanted to ensure that Pro did not attempt to shirk the obligation by arguing for it in only certain instances.My opponent also drops my argument that the obligation is meaningless if we already satisfied it by intervening in WWI and WWII. How can you say "we are obligated to intervene," when we are not obligated to ever do so because we have already "satisfied" our obligation in the past. My opponent's interpretation is incoherent because it implies a choice of whether to intervene in the future, which is not what an obligation entails.Conclusion: my opponent must defend the existence of the obligation, which means that morality requires us to intervene in any circumstance where there is an international conflict. North Korea: My opponent claims diplomacy worked here, without any factual support. North Korea doesn't care what the US tells them to do.Extending C1: costMy opponent claims that just because we are obligated to intervene doesn't mean we can't consider any other factors when deciding whether to intervene. He cites the example of a Mexican drug cartel about to kill a baby and says that even if he has a moral obligation to save the baby, he would not do so if his life was in danger. My opponent, however, simply has mistated the moral obligation in this case. The moral obligation is: "to save the lives of others if you can do so without dying yourself." My opponent is morally obligated to save the baby, unless doing so would mean certain death.In the present case, if my opponent agrees that the resolution should be "we are morally obligated to intervene in other countries, unless the cost to us is prohibitive," then this actually merits a Con vote. It means that the unqualified moral obligation in the current resolution is wrong. As we saw with the baby example, my opponent himself does not agree with the obligation "you are obligated to save babies' lives," but does agree with the obligation " you are obligated to save babies' lives if it entails no harm to yourself." If my opponent were faced with the first formulation, he would vote Con on the resolution because he doesn't want to die. Similarly, if you believe that cost should be a factor, you have to negate because the current resolution is unqualified: we must always intervene. It does not allow us to consider any other factors. Extending C2: turns to national security(1) Overstretching our militaryMy opponent responds by saying we *can* fight two wars at once, and he says, "look at Iraq and Afghanistan right now." However, we have almost no troops in either country. We have nearly completely withdrawn. In fact, Iraq asked us to send troops *back* to help with al Qaeda, and we said no. [1] Our present refusal to send troops back to Iraq (to fight al Qaeda no less) shows the effects of military overstretch and battle fatigue. The American people cannot bear another fight, even if the fight might have been *more useful* than the original invasion of Iraq in 2003. So there are now three ways that intervention decreases our national security: (1) it overstretches our military, which decreases its potential deterrent effect because we cannot project power elsewhere, (2) it breeds resentment among locals which causes them to join terrorist networks and attack us, and (3) it leads to battle fatigue among the American people so that if a real important international conflict happens (like WWII), the American people will refuse to enter it because they are tired of fighting.My opponent simply asserts that "of course our military is big enough to fight two wars at once." He ignores the actual evidence I presented that we do not have the force strength to meet the two-MRC test, which means according to the military itself, it could not fight in two regional conflicts at the same time. My opponent drops my argument that Afghanistan empirically proves this. It has been well-documents that when the Iraq invasion began in 2003, we pulled most of our resources out of Afghanistan, which allowed the Taliban to regroup and become a much greater threat there.(2) Breeds resentmentMy opponent is on crack to suggest that Iraq invaded Kuwait to start a Caliphate. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait because he was upset that Kuwait was slant drilling into Iraqi oil fields. We entered the war to protect our oil interests in Kuwait. I have provided sources that the reason bin Laden declared war on American (and not any other Western nations) was because we had troops stationed in Kuwait, which had caused massive resentment. It has been well documented that occupying forces stoke resentment among local populations (see, e.g., the Constitutional Amendment about quartering troops, when the Americans were mad about British forces staying in their homes during the French-Indian War).If bin Laden declared war because of "Islam" and a "caliphate," then he would have declared war on more countries than the US. And 9/11 would not have specifically targeted us. The reason why there was special hatred towards us in bin Laden's heart was our choice to invade and station troops in Kuwait.Conclusion: military overstretch, resentment, and battle fatigue turn my opponent's case because they all make us less safe and my opponent's entire case is about national security. In all likelihood, a conflict between two random nations is not going to be central to our national security. But if we intervene and waste massive military resources and make the locals hate us, that collateral effect will impact our national security.Extend C3: regional actors should intervene insteadMy opponent takes this place in the debate to say, "since this is LD, I can define the topic however I want." My opponent clearly doesn't know how LD works. You still have to prove the resolution true. Your "value" is just a lense through which the judge should view the debate. It is a weighing mechanism. When you say, "Value = national security," that means you want the judge to weigh national security most highly in the debate. It doesn't mean you can change the topic to be, "We have a moral obligation to intervene in international conflicts only when our national security is at risk." If the LD topic drafters wanted such a resolution, they would have made it: "we have a moral obligation to protect our national security." The part about "international conflicts" would just be a redundant distraction.Extend C4: choice vs. obligationMy opponent claims I have to be anti-national security. That's a stupid reading of the resolution. I would not have taken Con on a resolution that was "National security is good." I am in favor of choice of whether we want to intervene based on self-interest, rather than obligation to intervene based on morality. Pro has to defend the latter - the resolution mandates it. This has become a silly semantic debate because Pro doesn't really like the LD resolution. But the opposite of "obligation" is "choice."Rebuttal, cont'dMy opponent still fails to show - as is required by the Mearsheimer evidence - that intervening aboard makes us safer at home. He just laundry lists a bunch of conflicts, without proving how they made us safer.[1] http://tinyurl.com...