I left the US some 18 years ago… having lived behind the canon does not mean approving its use. I went to many, many protests while in the US.
As for disputing claims concerning the children massacred in Iraq, the exact number does not matter. There’s been disputes and counter disputes but no one reduced them to less than atrocious numbers. Sanctions kill and in large numbers. You’re bending over backwards trying to defend or to mitigate the indefensible and the only reason I see is what is called racism. Yes, I don’t think races exist either but that’s what they call your brand of bigotry.
Again concerning my arguments, you seem to agree with many of them. The part involving motives is in dispute and which started the whole argument. I claimed that the US and the ‘west’ is also ruled by an oligarchy so it wasn’t democracy versus oligarchy but oligarchy versus oligarchy. Your rant on Syria and Libya are part straw-man argument and part blind support for the west’s narrative. I mentioned Vietnam and all the other countries that the US savaged to dispute your narrative of 'ignorance' and 'irrationality' and to identify a more rational one.
I explained some structural reasons and mechanisms related to the nature of voting. A democracy is the rule of the majority. For example, polls related to universal health coverage have received strong majorities since Clinton and yet the US doesn’t have universal health coverage. A democracy would have had it by now. Many, many other examples of the same phenomenon. Ergo, the US is not a democracy. A simple random sample/poll of citizen choices (a mechanism by sampling rather than voting) would have gotten universal health coverage and more long ago. It seems Aristotle did know a thing or two ...
As for Saudi Arabia, I have blamed them most strongly, and publicly so, in my own country to the edge of my safety (I hope not beyond) and that of my family (I’ve been living in the region for the last 18 years and have only left briefly in the last 2 months). And Saudi Arabia is a serf of the US. 15 out of 19 of the US 9/11 were Saudis. Almost all the ISIS leaders and suicide bombers are Saudis. Yet the US did not invade or bomb Saudi Arabia. That is because it is already theirs. Trump declared that without the US, Saudi rule would not last a week. Trump is a crazy SOB but he was right on that one. People in the region know that too. The US intelligence strongly maintains the Saudi rule but not necessarily the individuals. I predict that the current king may be offed by the US if he goes through with the China deal. All oligarchic factions in the US are united against China. Finally, the Saudis do not have industry of their own, they get their weapons from the US and some from the UK and France. The US even runs their military airports (I have former engineering students who went to SA and worked on building some of those airports; I was a Professor of Civil Engineering and no I did not approve), US operatives man the targeting operations and even some US pilots fly some of the bombing missions. Saudi Arabia is a kingdom propped by the US and has been so since the beginning. So yes, they are to blame for Yemen. For your information, the leaders of the Yemen national forces always state in their TV communications (in Arabic) that their enemy is the Saudi Arabian-American 'rapist'.
Finally, I’m tired of this ‘discussion’ and this will be my last reply irrespective of your retort if any. You did not feel the brunt of the US empire but, aside from my 22 years in the US, I’ve seen and felt it firsthand and too much of it. Your rosy view of the ‘west’ ignores a lot of dirty history and current atrocities. Yes, you and many like you are (willfully) ignorant and perhaps irrational (as you say) but adding the insult of ‘culturism’ to your naive, counter factual narrative rubbed me the wrong way. You’re not that bad a person otherwise … good luck.
