I'm probably not making myself clear.

I'm not using South Africa as an example of how a regime should be changed. There are many ways to change a regime. Obviously, not all require military action. South Africa didn't. The Soviet Union didn't (I'm still on my knees for that miracle). Nazi Germany did. Imperial Japan did. Iraq did.

I'm throwing South Africa in the faces of those who are currently saying we should have just left Saddam's Iraq alone. That it was a functioning nation, that people were content with it, and prosperous. Hey, they had boats and cars, right? And electricity 24/7 (in Baghdad)? Who are we to tell them how to run their country and lives? We have no right to impose our "way of life" on them.

Why wouldn't these same dumbass arguments apply to South Africa? Who are elitist Americans to decide that apartheid is wrong and equal rights is right?

Cripes.

This attitude right now is what's pissing me off. I can handle someone who says Saddam had to go, but we did it the wrong way (what was the right way?).

To put it bluntly, the Left's designation of what regimes are oppressive and which ones can be ignored are based more on whether they are allied with the West or not, rather than objective standards. Granted, during the Cold War, the American government was not all that objective about this either, basing their standards on who was allied with the U.S.S.R. and who opposed it. But the latter is old news now. The former is still S.O.P. for the Left.

Incidentally, South Africa is a good example of how a regime behaves when they cooperate fully and freely with their own disarming process, compared to Iraq.