The greatness of America and other links

Glenn Greenwald catches a National Review writer making a familiar claim, that the US is the greatest country in world history, and therefore should be judged differently from Bad Nations. Greenwald discusses how much this belief helps to justify wars, drone bombs or at least excuse them—we can’t possibly have committed war crimes! We’re America!
Writer Charles Cooke responds, arguing that we are indeed objectively better than, say, North Korea. And that given this superiority (which he also grants to Western Europe) it is best that we dominate the world rather than North Korea.
This would be more convincing if more people who attest to our greatness were horrified by, say Abu Ghraib and Gitmo. If we’re great because of our actions rather than innately (Cooke: “It behaves differently.”), then bad actions lessen our greatness. Yet instead we get the “Abu Ghraib was just a frat party, no big” response (in fairness, I’ve no idea whether Cooke took that position).
And frankly, our history of running the world hasn’t been so hot. Yes, I’m glad the Soviet Union didn’t take more nations under its thumb than it did. But past Washington officials used the argument we were better than Them (and that it was absolutely imperative to stop Them) to justify overthrowing democratic governments in Guatemala (replacing them with genocidal tyrants), Chile (giving Chileans the brutal, murderous Pinochet regime) and Iran; backing death squads in El Salvador; supporting dictators in the Philippines; and paying millions to France not to give up its colonial regime in Vietnam, because we “knew” it was better for the Vietnamese to have European white people ruling them than control their own country. And even if it’s not better, it’s their country. We don’t get to vote just because we believe we have the answers.
And in the past decade we’ve seen Iraq invaded and reduced to shambles, drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan and other nations, Americans and foreigners locked up for life without trial … Like Cooke, I don’t want to see North Korea dictate to the world, but I don’t want us to do it either. In the end, we’ll rationalize what’s good for us is good for the world. As witness Cooke cites Iran as one of those countries we’re morally better than, but what about Saudi Arabia? Just as repressive as Iran, if not more so, yet nobody in Washington worries about its sizable influence. Unless you define good as “ally of the US” that doesn’t make sense.
As I said in a past column, “Cloaking our actions in the greater good makes it easier to ignore how fundamentally selfish our policies often are. It’s legitimate to act in our own interests. It’s never legitimate to advance our interests by screwing over the people of some other nation.”
You can also check out a past post of mine on American exceptionalism.
In a related topic, Slacktivist catches one advocate for intervening in Syria accusing an anti-interventionist of being pro-regime, the same argument thrown around so much before Iraq: Are you denying Saddam is evil? If he’s so evil, why don’t you want us to intervene?
Slacktivist suggests it’s like theodicy in religion—the question of why bad things happen to good people. The US is good, therefore we mustn’t tolerate evil, and we’re powerful so we must be able to destroy it. Therefore there’s no reason not to do it, unless you side with evil.
As David Rieff points out in A Bed for the Night, humanitarian intervention is often a contradiction in terms (I doubt tens of thousands of dead Iraqis felt liberated by our invasion. Or as the blogger Hilzoy once put it “Violence is not a way of getting where you want to go, only more quickly. Its existence changes your destination. If you use it, you had better be prepared to find yourself in the kind of place it takes you to.” And we usually aren’t (just look at Iraq).
For related topics, here’s the Christian Science Monitor taking it as a given we should do something about Hugo Chavez if we can (obviously an older post).