Joe -
We never fired a shot in anger at the USSR? Well, literally, very few, but VietNam, Afghanistan (in the 70s and 80s), and to a lesser extent Korea were all clashes between the US and the Soviets.
"Bomb people into the age of democracy" -- I'll hand it to you, you've got the knee-jerk Liberal hymnal memorized. There is a fundamental difference between the "people" and the "regime" that oppresses them. We can remove the regime that keeps information/ideas/liberty from the people and then allow them to make their own decisions.
In fundamentalist or statist countries (think the Mullahcracy in Iran, Taliban Afghanistan or Kim Jong Il's North Korean Peoples' Paradise) priority number one is keeping information from the outside world from getting to your people -- if not at all, then at least unfiltered. This not only allows them to indoctrinate their subjects with bilious hatred, baselessly blaming US and the West for the oppression the tyrants visit upon them ("The US wants to keep you down" "The US poisons our people" "Israelis make matzoh with blood", etc.), but prevents awareness that others have it better than they do (whether monetarily, in terms of freedom from governmental caprice, or just plain enjoying liberty), which leads to criticism of the regime and movement for change. All people know is what they're told (overstatement, but ride with it for a while); if all they're told is that their misery is the US' fault and not the result of a 12th century fundamentalist theocratic, anti-liberty, anti-innovation, anti-human rights regime, and they're forbidden on penalty of death from saying it's the regime's fault in public, then they're going to believe what they've heard over and over, which, coincidentally is the only thing they're allowed to believe. (whoa, long sentence). One final bit on this topic -- the fundamentalist Arab world and the North Koreas of the world are not "lacking" in rights, liberty, freedoms, etc., in the sense that there's a shortage that could be cured within the extant paradigm -- the regimes which govern these countries are actively opposed to such things and seek out and destroy them like an auto-immune system, aware of the toxicity such things visit upon tyranny.
So "all you have to do is give people access to..." means nothing. The tyrants whose very existence depends on depriving their subjects of access to the outside world are certainly not going to allow it. We can't "give" the subjects of these tyrants access to anything without being on the ground to do it. What do you suggest -- cargo drops of PCs w/ satellite uplinks over hostile territory so everybody in Iran/NK can get on the Internet and check out the world?
Look, people are fundamentally stupid animals. We've got this great self-image in the West about how we've put so much of our barbaric past behind us and can "solve" issues w/ words. I think this is hokum when dealing with the vast majority of rest of the world (witness the utter ineffectiveness of the UN or Clinton/Carter's "solving" the NK nuke situation w/ conferences). By design these other people remain backward and brutal - not unlike animals. They understand force and we've put a big fat head on a very tall spike in the heart of the Arab world. It's unsophisticated, it's not nuanced, but what it is is more important -- effective.
You wanna go hug a jihadist? Fine, we'll work in parallel.
JP