Also, why should criticism of the US be accompanied by criticism of the US's enemies? I think that's your ultimate intent (after 5 pages of insulting me): you cannot accept criticism of the US if one does not criticize terrorism in the same post. Why? The two are not the same issue.
I will try to explain why you may encounter criticisms of your posts that sound like that.
To many Americans, and to myself, the situation in the world looks pretty obvious. Really evil people - like al-Qaeda, like the Communists, like the Nazis - are trying to enslave as much of the world as they can get their hands on.
The United States is by no means perfect. And, in the past, it was even worse than it is today. It wasn't until the 1960s that segregation was finally dealt with.
But like Canada, Britain, Sweden, or Switzerland, it was a democracy. A country where, by and large, political issues were debated openly. Where people did not live in fear of the secret police.
So while it made perfectly good sense to criticize the U.S. strongly about things like segregation... another kind of criticism seems so bizarre as to be beyond the pale.
While the suggestion that the U.S. should not be the "world's policeman" is not in itself in this category, anything that suggests that a government like the one in mainland China, for example... is anything but a cabal of thugs, or has any right to exist... makes it appear that the author has forgotten the central and most obvious fact of world politics: the night and day difference between the world's democracies (good) and the various dictatorships that the U.S. regards as enemies (evil).
One can advocate peace with the Soviet Union because of the terrible consequences of nuclear war.
But to suggest, even for a second, that the Soviet Union had a valid perspective to contribute - when it's a place with secret police and slave labor camps - right, this fellow has taken leave of his senses, and it's no use talking to him.
The trouble is, though, that while what the Soviet Union
actually was had nothing to contribute, what it
pretended to be was different. While the supremacy of the Aryan Race was self-evidently stupid, that governments should concern themselves primarily with the well-being of the ordinary working man was not.
And so while the United States entered World War II against the Nazis only after it was itself attacked in Pearl Harbor (an oversimplification, of course, there was Lend-Lease)... it sent troops to fight Communism in Korea and Vietnam.
Which would have been comparable to the United States Army being dispatched to Spain to help defeat Franco.
Part of this difference was simply a rational response to the refutation of isolationism - both by World War II, and by nuclear arms. But it is also well realized that the influence of big business, and the fear that the professed ideals of Communism would inspire such things as trade unionism... meant that while it was respectable to denounce the Bolshevics even in 1920, people who were alert to the menace of Hitler were considered radicals and troublemakers.
The notion that "the enemy is never on the left" is the over-reaction to that.
So, since al-Qaeda wants to create a world where non-Muslims can't effectively get justice if their daughters are violated by Muslims - this is a level of
total evil far beyond any minor imperfections of the United States or any minor imperfections of Israel, also a modern democratic nation.
Recognizing this, all the democracies, while not suppressing their differences, but dealing with them frankly - should still recognize that these differences are trivial in comparison to the immense gulf that separates them from dictatorships. So the democracies should stick together against the dictatorships.
Thus, a foreign democracy might deplore how the U.S. used napalm in Vietnam, for example. That is fair enough.
But if it characterized the war as one of aggression against North Vietnam - instead of aggression by North Vietnam against South Vietnam, which was not perfect, but not the absolute totalitarian nightmare that Communist North Vietnam was - that is going beyond the pale. That is just being crazy.
