Not really. Sometimes I overeat. Today at work I ate several cookies and felt bad about it (not that bad, damn they were yummy). Does this mean I cannot criticize a person prostituting themselves for crack?
This isn't eating cookies. What kind of cookies? I miss Mother's Iced Raisin cookies and flaky flix.
We killed millions of people for no good reason in Vietnam given our issues. Which Muslim country has done that? That's not eating cookies.
This is you simply having a strong bias in how you weight the issues - the same thing many supporters of Muslim states would do the other direction.
Sad fact is, a history of the west with hundreds of corrupted governments empowered for the west's interests gets a big yawn from many Americans; not from those people.
It seems almost no end of countries that need to be militarily put to sleep and Syria is surely at the top of the list now next to Libya. Perhaps if Turkey does something (I doubt it), they'll do a better job than the epic cluster fvck going on in Libya. Five months now and they still cannot get rid of Gadhafi. This is what happens when you half-ass something.
Funny enough, Libya had practically become an 'acceptable' state, too. Over the last decades they spent billions for victims of terrorism, leading to Bush to sign a law giving immunity to Libya for all lawsuits by terrorist victims, ending all pending lawsuits. They'd been taken off the 'terrorist nation watchlist'. Senators like John McCain were visiting Qadafi praising him.
Then the uprising came. It shows how these issues aren't easy. Are leaders supposed to just resign when there's an uprising? When parts of Libya were seized by rebels, was Qadafi not supposed to defend the government's control of the positions? It gets tricky, between the lines of 'we don't much like a regime' to supporting its overthrow; between a government's right to defend against rebellion, and brutal killing of its own citizens; between protestors, rebels and revolutionaries; between the US interests in siding with the people's right to self-determination, and the US interest in not having its allies, like decades-long Mubarak, think the US will abandon them easily. This is a way for the US to get caught looking out of touch supporting Mubarak earlier.
I supported the use of force to protect Libyans from slaughter by the Libyan government. But these issues aren't easy. Criticizing the government is.
Are we supposed to run around deposing and assassinating leaders 'just because' there is a rebel element in their country? Are we supposed to do nothing in the face of the slaughter of the people who are revolting? How about demonstrating? An old saying now is 'one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter'. And any issue you say is 'ok' to use force for, will often be misused by corrupt interests to put corrupt people in place.
Diem was the US choice for Vietnam; and he was widely viewed as terribly corrupt and repressive of the rights of Buddhists to the point he couldn't govern effectively.
The *same administration* in the US did two things: it had a coup in which Diem was removed from power; and a little while earlier had the Vice-President visiting Diem and saying to the press that Diem was 'the Winston Churchill of Southeast Asia', giving him huge praise.
I could contrast quotes in the last year or two by American leaders praising Qadafi with our actions now people like you seem to say aren't strong enough to assassinate him.
It's easy to sit in your armchair and demand we go kill all the 'bad leaders'. Makes a pretty good case for American foreign policy being suspected, elected by you.
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