This is the future of the US........

[Kirkland Laing]

Picking three well-known nice people to show how religion affects the US really isn't answering the question, is it? Especially as only one of them is even American.

MLK isn't a good example either. The US establishment turned against him and most of their support came from southern white religious folks. The southern churches didn't want anything to do with race reform.

But how does religion actually affect US policy, especially towards the rest of the world?

OK how's about evil non-religious people.

Josef Stalin - USSR
Mao ZeDung - China
Adolf Hitler - Germany
Pol Pot - Cambodia
Slobodan Milocevic - Yugoslavia
Saddam Hussein - Iraq
Robert Mugabe - Zimbabwe
Augusto Pinochet - Chile
Ceauşescu - Romania

There's a ton more I am sure....you don't HAVE to be religious to be a horrible leader

You "took over" Vietnam too. Iraq and Afghanistan have been similarly "taken over."

...Vietnam had support from China and the USSR as well as Kennedy botched putting in replacement leaders (and he was a Democrat).

The take over of Iraq and Afghanistan were possibly the greatest military successes of all time....talk about total domination.....now taking over and holding power are totally different things but the "Shock and Awe" campaign was a total success....the "Enduring Freedom" campaign was a total shame.....the surge has worked since then though and the slow down now is mainly political.

What does a bunch of dictators, some of whom used religion like Bush does, have to do with anything?

Taking over Iraq and Afghanistan were nothing at all. The Afghans and the Iraqis let you drive down the only road in their countries to take their capital, then started insurgencies. Driving up the only road in the country to an undefended capital is not exactly the greatest military success of all time. Look how successful it is now too.

The surge hasn't worked at all. It's just temporarily delayed things. There's now no moves towards political reconciliation being taken in Iraq. The country's now run by Iran. They're going to get the oil and we're going to be left to police a statelet of millions of outrages, impoverished Sunnis who used to run the world's second-largest oil reserve and now own a bunch of date palms. And this is being presented as a success.

Victory in Iraq was supposed to be a quick war, of minimal costs and casualties, creating little strain on our military, that resulted in a liberal, democratic, unified peaceful state that would set off a chain reaction of democratic uprisings in the Muslim world, while vastly weakening al-Qaeda and other extremist organizations. Now Iran own the good bit and we've got a problem that's going to see us face terrorism for decades while policing the world's terrorist capital, the Country Formerly Known As Iraq.