For those of you who were liberals, why did you repeatedly fall victim to regime change propaganda?

I wasn't old enough to vote until it became abundantly clear that the Iraq invasion/occupation was a complete shitshow. I only ever "fell for it" when I was a kid who passively absorbed the early post-9/11 insanity. When I've brought up drone strikes in Yemen and Libya to my gen X parents (in order to criticize Obama and Biden), or otherwise criticized US imperialism, they would fall back on excuses rooted in the kill-or-be-killed logic of Hobbesian geopolitics.

Liberals interpret "our troops keep us safe" not necessarily as the US military safeguarding American capitalist interests, but instead may genuinely believe that if the US didn't commit atrocities across the globe and maintain the largest military in the world by a wide margin, that other countries would attack, colonize, and oppress us the same way our government has to their peoples. Fictional stories featuring the US military written for US audiences tend to construct nightmare fantasy scenarios like this a lot - think back to all those times Jack Bauer just happens to prevent terrorists from bombing innocent civilians because he got his hands dirty and tortured enemy captives - and the average class-unconscious liberal will simply interpret those premises as realistic, with the conclusions (the US military as an institution can do no wrong; war crimes like torture can occasionally be justified; etc.) following smoothly from the misleading framing.

Put simply, US liberals fall for this kind of shit not only because of corporate news media pulling tricks like claiming "whataboutism" and human rights concern trolling, but through a combination of this nonfiction propaganda and fiction propaganda which helps civilians fill in the blanks, ridiculous stories in TV shows like 24 or the storylines of most Call of Duty games which say the quiet part louder and aggravate fears of imperialist boogeymen introduced through nonfiction propaganda. I can think of no other way that so many liberals went from being outraged about Abu Ghraib to calling you a Russian troll for daring to call out Obama for droning civilians overseas and pretending they were enemy combatants to cover his ass: seeing heroic characters like Jack Bauer, Jack Ryan, James Bond, Nolan's Batman, or MCU Iron Man do or co-sign similarly grisly shit and be presented as in the right for doing so.