>>>> So strictly speaking, the US is the bigger evil because it is doing all those things right now

> No, it is not.

??? Yes it is!

It's replaced countries leaders with ones more suitable to US interests. Thrown entire countries into a state of war. That's destabilizing.

I'm going to hope we can agree that throwing bombs on people is hurting them?

Finally, if providing terrorist organisations (AQ was an "ally" back then) with weaponry isn't "inciting violence", then I don't know what is. Also quite destabilizing to the region btw.

> Of course US is "meddling" - without that "meddling" real evil - you know, guys like Hitler, Hussein, Pol Pot, etc. - would feel much freer to perpetrate their evil deeds. "Meddling" is the only moral thing to do if you see people's rights violated and freedoms infringed.

I'm going to ask you to be a bit more skeptical than that. You do know that the US gov / military has routinely lied about their intents to the US people right? So you should at least give some consideration to the following:

Saving the poor people of the Middle East from those evil dictators was not the reason for getting involved at all.

Gaining political and military control over one of the largest deposits of fossil fuels, of course is.

Why do I believe this is the case? Because there's TONS of terrible evil being committed to poor people all over the world, many of these things would be quite the low hanging fruit to get involved with. But instead, the US picks this rich and relatively well-armed hornet's nest to get sucked in by. Oops.

Judging that in the category of "saving people from evil / having their rights violated and freedoms infringed", it's pretty much an abject failure. With those very same resources they could have saved so much more lives if they really cared for that, at the cost of so much less lives of American soldiers, if they even cared for THAT.

There are so many really real evil guys in the world, committing really really bad atrocities on the people they sit on top of, in countries you really never hear about because they're poor and far away and not really interesting (untrue, Tajikistan is super interesting).

Also it's super easy propaganda-wise to paint the cause for fighting in a far-away country as something heroic and moral, when it's really about oil, power and control. There's a few more motivating factors besides those, but none of them amount to "because we're the good guys".

Finally to address your point about relativism and moral bankruptcy. IF I could truly and honestly believe that the US primary goal in the Middle East is to save these people from evil dictators and provide them with freedom and human rights (c'mon! it can't even provide those to US citizens at home!), if I could believe that to be true, then I'd probably be mostly in agreement with you, really. Doing good is a good thing.

It's just that, from the outside, it seems pretty obvious that the US is not there with the intent to do good to the people, but to control the natural resources and sources of power.

Every time you seen people all "yay! the evil dictator is gone!" it turned out to be a photo-op, didn't you notice? Didn't you see the zoomed-out version of that well-directed scene where they toppled Saddam's statue? Tanks! Cameras! Action! Most non-actor people were instead wondering "when will the US stop occupying our country". The REAL celebrations you won't see, will happen when your soldiers finally leave (aka, never).