Re:should come in handy (Score 1)

It's true that some US military actions in this period were for the best, and even some that turned out badly were at least motivated by something more honourable than protecting the business interests of governmental cronies. Others were very much not.

I sympathize with your annoyance at what may seem like knee-jerk anti-Americanism, but it is equally knee-jerk to assume the US were always the heroes in all these engagements. Just because you know bad things about a place that the US bombed, you can't infer that the bombing was aimed at those bad things.

For example: Cambodia. Pol Pot was not the target of US bombing, but an unintended beneficiary of it. The bombing was a (disastrous and illegal) sideshow of the Vietnam War. When the US eventually got the hell out of the region, the Khmer Rouge moved in unhindered -- and stayed in unchallenged.

As to your latter arguments, I don't know what liberals you've been encountering, but no-one I know defends Taliban or Saudi sexism (too weak a word for it, btw), or any of their many other terrible crimes. Then again, both regimes were (and in the case of the Sauds still are) propped up by the US. As was Saddam's regime in Iraq when it was expedient to do so (throughout the war with Iran that you cite as killing millions, for example).