You can't just lump all this together under one big "America doing imperialism" umbrella. Some actions (the invasion of Iraq) cause exponentially more death and destruction than others (bombing Libya).
We killed a tenth of Iraq's pre-war population over the course of our invasion and occupation. That same ratio would mean about 8 million dead Iranians had the situation not cooled off. We killed maybe 8 million people in Iraq, Vietnam, and Korea combined. Even risking that (and the thing about brinksmanship is you don't always manage to stop short of the cliff) ranks just shy of actually invading and occupying a country, especially when you tear up a treaty and invent a crisis out of whole cloth to get there. It definitely doesn't fall into the category of "relatively normal" U.S. imperialism. A real chance of killing that many people is not just another fuckup on the pile.
You can't just lump all this together under one big "America doing imperialism" umbrella. Some actions (the invasion of Iraq) cause exponentially more death and destruction than others (bombing Libya).
We killed a tenth of Iraq's pre-war population over the course of our invasion and occupation. That same ratio would mean about 8 million dead Iranians had the situation not cooled off. We killed maybe 8 million people in Iraq, Vietnam, and Korea combined. Even risking that (and the thing about brinksmanship is you don't always manage to stop short of the cliff) ranks just shy of actually invading and occupying a country, especially when you tear up a treaty and invent a crisis out of whole cloth to get there. It definitely doesn't fall into the category of "relatively normal" U.S. imperialism. A real chance of killing that many people is not just another fuckup on the pile.