One more thing about this "why criticize the US of A" about current policies towards Iraq, Afghanistan, and the war on terror.

There is the truism that if we don't know and understand our history, we are destined to repeat it. The US is now viewed as being the greatest threat to world security for a very good reason. It is the US government policies of many years, of exploiting and manipulating "our bastards" (as former ambassador to the UN for the Reagan administration, Jean Kirkpatrick, said when acknowledging the US policy preference for supporting puppet governments and putting despots in power around the world), that has now come home to roost. It is that policy which brought on the 9/11 attacks. Osama bin Laden was "our bastard". Saddam Hussein was "our bastard". The Taliban were "our bastards". Ferdinand Marcos was "our bastard". Somoza was "our bastard". Ariel Sharon is "our bastard". The South African apartheid government was "our bastards".

The list of the United States' "our bastards" who are tyrants, despots, butchers, and monsters is very long indeed. The US citizenry is now paying the price, literally, for our government's mistakes. We are paying for a war on terror that never needed to happen. We are paying for an occupation in Iraq that never needed to happen. We are paying for an occupation in Afghanistan that never needed to happen. All the money going to those foreign military occupations is money that could have been used at home and abroad, for desperately needed peaceful, civil uses, like education, health care, affordable housing, raising standards of living, building sustainable economies, research and development of non-polluting and less polluting energy production, manufacturing, business and residential uses, etc.

All this money, all this blood being spent and spilled in our name, is an utter waste of human ingenuity, resourcefulness, curiousity, creativity, and our best instincts as human beings to care for one another. An utter, criminal waste. And I, for one, am not willing to forgive the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush administrations for creating that legacy. Which makes me very critical of those despots, indeed.

Now, as a result of American imperial adventuring and over-reach around the globe.