Somebody: No, it's not single-variable. It's simply that the U.S. and it's British and French clients are so overwhelmingly dominant a variable here that from a distance they might almost be a single-variable. We all use cognitive short-cuts to make sense of the world, which in and of itself is irreducibly complex, as bourgeois political scientists have noted for decades. One of these, for instance, is democracy or democratic republicanism. As a form of short-hand, most of us say we support democracy. In fact, that's what supporters of the intervention in Libya are saying.
Similarly, we can say we oppose imperialism. By what do we mean by this? Well, namely we mean we reject the intervention, manipulation, control, exploitation, and immiseration of weaker countries by the major capitalist industrialized powers. This is not an abstract or academic point, I'm afraid. For those of us who remember past the last couple months, imperialist intervention in the Middle East led to many hundreds of thousands of deaths, the setting back of entire countries by *generations* of development, and the subjugation of the Palestinian people to a colonial enterprise seemingly best suited for the 19th century. Moreover, beyond these concrete consequences, it meant the fostering of illusions in the U.S. as a fair impartial global arbiter, of the West as the paragon of liberty and progress, and of an idea of politics in which subjugated peoples around the world should appeal to foreign powers and NGO's for their rights, instead of advocating
and fighting for them themselves, with all the terrible results which follow from this illusion.
Apparently, there are still some mature individuals of leftist persuasion who still fall prey to these illusions after the Iraqi disaster. Parenthetically, I have the sense that many people have not come to grips with the holocaust that the U.S. brought to Iraq in the years 1991 - 2003. If they had, I should scarcely think they would scoff at the idea of associating the term "evil" with the United States, not that I care for such Biblical terminology myself.