This is not so much a discussion as an attempt to clarify your many misconceptions about my positioon on these issues.

You insist on a black and white perspective on the US. When I don't take a firm stand with you pouring hate on the US, you decide that I am an aplogist for the US. You judge people you don't know. I am a Nordic and here we seldom see the world in terms of evil and good. Whatever country you would talk about and whatever leadership discussed I would seldom if ever assume their motivations are driven purely by malice or evil.

I think Socrates was right in that what many people call evil is really just a form of ignorance. Many horrible people do bad things while themselves being convinced they are doing a good thing.

My home town got blown up by a terrorist. He later massacred young people on an island in the Oslo fjord. I was myself a teenager like that spending time on the same island. I have absolutely no reason to sugar coat what that terrorist did. It affected my life and people in the same political youth organization I had once been member of. Yet, I still believe the terrorist did what in his warped sene of reality was a good thing. In his mind he was "saving" Norway from an invasion.

It is why I believe knowledge and discussions are so important. People who live in alternative realities can developed such a warped sense or reality that they go on killing scores of innocent people. The worst is when leaders of large powerful nations get trapped inside these warped senses of reality.

You lived in the US yourself, so you must have seen what I have seen: A media reality which twists reality and make a lot of American live in a bubble. To some degree we all are. Those who grow up in dictatorships end up in some of the most distorted versions of reality.

In your view it seems like the world is either democracy or dictatorship. But reality is that between dictatorship and democracy there are a lot of shades of gray. As I have pointed out the US is a deeply flawed democracy. Yet, that does not make the US the same as Russia, China or Saudi Arabia. That seems to be your deal.

The biggest problem with the US is not that the democracy is flawed but the combination of flawed democracy and immense power. Things don't go wrong in the world because the US is so exceptionally bad run, but because it is so exceptionally powerful. If Norway had been as flawed as the US, it simply would never have had the consequences a badly run US has.

Your interpretation of the relation between the US and Saudi Arabia expose your desire to explain the world in overly simplistic terms. I am a bit surprised given your backround as a civil engineering professor that you prefer such dumbed down explanations. All relations cannot be reduced to a master-slave relation. There is such a thing as mutual need and mutually assured destruction. Your interpretatio of the 9/11 bombers is in particular peculiar. It does not demonstrate American power over Saudi Arabia but rather its weakness. America doesn't own Saudi Arabia. If it did it would not have had all those insane religious laws. Nor would national oil companies have controlled most of the oil.

I did not feel the brunt of the US empire? We all have. Thanks to US invasions in he middle East Islamic terrorism got greatly amplified. Refugee streams multiplied. Politics got radicalized. Europe has taken in large number of refugees because of those invasions. Many of them live in my neighborhood. In fact the majority of my neighbours are muslims.

That is fine, but not everybody has managed to adjust. There has been shootings, gang violence, stabbings, burned out cars.

I have volunteered to help many of these immigrant kids with things like homework. It is not always easy to fix the problems people face when you try to get them through highly school in a year, but they have lost out way too much school from having been refugees or what not.

You have a schizophrenic take on my view of the West. First you ackhowledge that I see many of the problems. Next you say I have a rose view... Make up your mind. Which one is it exactly?

The problem is that you don't see the full picture of my view because you aren't even trying. You are just latching onto random details and use them to draw broad conclusions. A great example is our back and forth on Iraqi children. I never made the exact number of children affected by US sanctions as some kind of corner stone of my argument. I didn't try to argue that the invasion was fine because the number of dead children was profondly inflated.

I was simply trying to moderate your extremely one sides black and white view. You cherry pick the worst you can find and claim that is the true story.

You cannot claim the same applies to me. I have not cherry picked the best about the US, because I have been highly critical of their foreign policy. In short I am presenting a grownup nuanced view while you are trying to push a cartoon version of reality.

When I point that out you throw a tempertantrum and call me a racist.

Is that how you deal with arguments in academic setting or with you students? Whever somebody disagrees with you, you start with name calling?

A proper academic would have relied on the quality of their arguments instead.