Do you remember in 2004 when the news about US abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison broke? Remember how stunned and outraged pretty much every sane person in the United States was about this, to say nothing of the people whose country it happened in (and next to?) The outrage was very real, and it was very deserved. That it would happen was unthinkable, and greatly demoralizing.
Of course, th baath regime that ruled Iraq had been doing even worse things in Abu Ghraib since they took power. Go have a look at some of those photos, then imagine worse. way way worse. Little girls raped to death to punish their parents worse.
Where was the outrage then? where was the horror, the criticism, the shock and horror? Where were the front-page spreads on the New York Times or the morning news shows? WHERE? There weren't any.
By your logic on display here, that's because everyone hates America and loved Saddam, right? The loud focus on the one instead of hte other is some sort of weird racist self-loathing by Americans , and anti-yankee persecution and the worst of blood libels from the rest of the world, right?
Wrong.
It's because nobody ever, ever expected better of Saddam. He was already known as a brutal, gruesome dictator with no problems gassing thousands of Iraqis (or for that matter tens of thousands of Iranians, but that was never newsworthy apparently). But America was the beacon of freedom, a humane western nation espousing liberty and protection and equality.
Saddam acted exactly like everyone expected Saddam to act. When the US borrowed even a portion of his script, it was genuinely shovcking, because - imagine this - a civilized democratic nation preaching liberty is held to higher standards than an authoritarian dictatorship run by a guy who collects black velvet pornography and literally remakes Babylon in his own image.
Israel is held to a higher standard than Syria, by the same token. if it ever gets to the point where people don't expect Israel to be better-behaved than motherfucking Bashir Assad or the coked-up islamists trying ot murder him, then maybe you have cause to complain.
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