In the name of Freedom: (from Jadaliyya)

"The deaths of approximately 3500 Syrians, and the incarceration of up to 50,000 more, are not just statistics to the people whose lives have been damaged irreparably by the disappearance of relatives, friends, and colleagues. Dreadful too are the effects of U.S. drone attacks in Yemen and Pakistan, which have killed thousands and are less subject to international censure, however. As the curtain comes down on a near decade of destruction in Iraq—a conflict launched under false pretenses with a legacy that is far from certain—the death toll runs anywhere from a few hundred thousand to more than a million, depending on who is counting the bodies. There’s also American support for the seemingly endless Israeli occupation; the Bahraini government’s attempts to squelch protest and U.S. relative silence about that; American ally Saudi Arabia’s ongoing and deleterious intervention in Yemeni affairs; Saudi threats to pummel its own domestic resistance with an “iron fist”; and the U.S. support for Libyan rebels whose aspirations for regime change were accompanied by the wholesale massacre of entire street blocks of Libyan civilians. In the name of freedom, the U.S. has been shoring up autocracies and promoting violence for decades, as everyone knows, and it continues to do so with impunity. It is difficult even to recite these facts without sounding shrill, while rehearsing the atrocities of regimes deemed “rogue” gets coded as reasonable. That very judgment of reasonableness is part of the double standard—permitting Americans to live comfortably with contradictions and evidence of outright hypocrisy."