I don’t disagree with your assessment of America’s imperialist tendencies, but I think it’s naive and simplistic to reduce those tendencies to a mere desire to extract resources from other countries. There are several reasons we are in Afghanistan, of varying moral justification—but I doubt the existence of mineral wealth is one of them. There’s no evidence whatsoever that Bush admin even knew about the minerals when they decided to invade. The invasion was clearly a direct response to 9/11. And as far as our continuing presence there, ask yourself if we’d still be there if there weren’t any minerals (the answer is yes).
As for the military once being more honorable than today, I just think that’s a load of horseshit. You can argue that World War 2 was fought for more honorable reasons, and I’d agree. But our military firebombed civilian centers and killed hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of innocent people in that war. In Vietnam, our military’s rules of engagement allowed them to dump napalm on villages; we killed perhaps 3 million innocent Vietnamese civilians in that war. Talk about honorable.
I was completely opposed to the Iraq War, and I think Bush’s handling of the Afghanistan war has been utterly abysmal. But compare the number of civilians killed by our military in these conflicts to earlier ones. I don’t see a decline in military honor, I see a military slowly but surely getting more careful about excessive use of force—though they still have a long way to go.