You don't have to agree with any particular view to understand the two sides.
If someone in Japan had persuaded the government not to launch Pearl Harbor, you wouldn't know he was a pacifist - and Ron Paul opposing the Iraq war doesn't make him a pacifist, it makes him someone who supports war being more limited to legitimate self defense, it means he's against illegal, aggressive war.
I don't see the United States 'as an empire builder'; I see it as the militarily most powerful nation in the world, and one that makes some decisions that are imperialistic, in varying manner and degree, and some that are not. If you disagree that the US acts to build empire to some degree, with a broad meaning of empire, including other forms of domination, exploitation, expropriation than the traditional occupation, then we do disagree, and it's hard to see how you could reach such an obviously wrong position.
It's tempting to have you injure yourself a bit by reading a book such as Michael Parenti's 'Against Empire'.
Anyway, your characterization of Ron Paul as a pacifist is simply unreasonable, wrong, spin. And I say that as someone who doesn't see pacifist as a dirty word, for what I understand it to mean, which is not the same thing that it's commonly misunderstood (IMO) to mean, where Hitler would have been allowed to conquer the world.
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