The United States has a moral obligation to mitigate international conflicts

== Resolutional Analysis ==I would just be beating a dead horse at this point. I leave it up for the judges to decide whether an obligation means you must act or whether obligation gives you the choice of whether you want to act. If a child's mom says, "you are obligated to do the dishes," my opponent would say, "Dishes is plural, meaning one or more dish. You can do two dishes, and then you never have to do dishes again for the rest of your life." The child tries only doing two dishes. The mom gets mad because "the dishes" meant "all the dishes." In the same way, "international conflicts" means "all the international conflicts" and "obligation" means must intercede.I also don't want to beat the poor dead horse of whether my opponent can merely cherry pick past examples of successful interventions and say, "obligation satisfied." The resolution forces Pro to argue future interventions, and we cannot know prior to intervening whether we will succeed. Therefore, the obligation applies to whether we try to mitigate, it does not allow Pro to assume that all US intervenions will be successful in mitigating. == LD debate lets the Pro side change the topic == I coached LD debaters for four years. This simply isn't true. A "value" is a weighing mechanism, not a way to narrow the topic so the Pro does not have to defend it (see sources for proof). [1]Regardless, I never agreed to debate by the rules of LD, simply because the topic is an LD topic. To the extent that LD allows my opponent to cheat and avoid the topic, I refuse to accept the LD style in this debate.Extend C1: CostMy opponent doesn't really have an answer, except lives outweigh cost. However, money has an opportunity cost. People are dying in the US because of poverty. My opponent does not explain why morality requires giving money away to other countries - to mitigate their problems - when there is a moral need to save lives in the US. That is our money after all. Instead of building one B2 bomber (such as to do peacekeeping by dropping bombs in Serbia), we could instead build 171 schools. My opponent's value is really my value: put American lives first. However, to vote Pro, you would have to believe that we are morally obligated to act even when no US lives are at stake.Extend C2: intervention makes us less safeMy opponent's only real answer is "of course we can be in two places at once." There is a difference between our military stationing small numbers of troops in multiple places (we have troops stationed in at least 60 different countries) and our military being able to fight two major regional wars simultaneously. My arguments turn my opponent's case because intervention threatens our national security in three ways: (1) it decreases our power projection capabilities, making war more likely against our allies and homeland, (2) it stokes terrorist sentiments among locals, and (3) it causes battle fatigue so the American people are not willing to go to war when we actually need to.My opponent has no real response to these arguments.Extend C3: regional actorsThe topic is most definitely United States specific. But why are *we* the ones who have this moral obligation. Why don't regional actors have to intervene instead? Regional conflicts affect them far more than it does us.Extend C4: choice vs. obligationI really fail to see why the resolution does not allow me to argue this. When we intervene out of choice - because it is in our strategic interest to do so - we are making a selfish decision about what is in our best interest. In contrast, a moral obligation requires us to sacrifice and do something that we do not want to do, but are morally obligated to do. My opponent is trying to avoid arguing the topic by saying we should intervene only in cases when we want to. A moral obligation is meaningless if it applies only when it aligns perfectly with our self-interest. Morality requires something more than pure self-interest.Rebuttal, cont'dMy opponent seems to say in the previous round that we should send troops back to Iraq because people are dying there. First, that would be horribly costly. Second, it would exacerbate the accusation that we are occupiers (which is why we have almost no troops in Iraq - because of the accusation that we just wanted their oil). Third, Iraqi internal strife is not an "international conflict."My opponent's own past examples have already been turned against him and remain so. In WWII, had we never meddled with Japan by embargoing them for invading China, they would have never attacked Pearl Harbor. Proof that our meddling makes us less safe. In Gulf War I, we simply managed to convince Iran to get nuclear weapons, while not making ourselves any safer (by eliminating Saddam Hussein).North Korea: my opponent is making baseless claims. North Korea's nuclear threats against the US were meaningless. It is not diplomacy that stopped them from nuking us, but rather our own nuclear deterrent and the technological incapacity of their ICBM's to even reach Japan.Laundry list: my opponent laundry listed a bunch of past conflicts last round. He never explains how any of them furthered our national security nor did he prove how we intervened. I find it hard to believe that anything we have done in Pakistan has made us more safe. Pakistan is a terrible ally. Had we warned them about our operation against bin Laden, the ISI would have alerted bin Laden, and he would not have been there when Seal Team 6 arrived.[1] http://www.wikihow.com...