Freedom: The Middle East, The West - A Moral Imperative or Not?

Events in Libya Egypt and elsewhere in North Africa are still unfolding yet already there are mutterings in the media about the UN or NATO or the USA or even the UK's own  SAS going in to prevent Libya's despot from further massacring his own country's citizens.  How fickle the media can be and in truth how fickle we can all be.

The invasion of Iraq  based on the on the WMD lie though it was,  at least resulted in the deposing of its ruthless dictator - a man  on whose watch many of Iraq's Kurds were slaughtered by use of poison gas with the way of life of many of the remaining marsh Kurds being willfully ruined by the draining of their marshlands.

 Yet most of the media and many citizens in already  free Western countries like the UK,  now view the invasion of Iraq with horror although the few Iraqi emigres that I know say otherwise.

For the UK at least, if invading a country to depose a ruthless dictator would be the morally correct course of action to contemplate, Mugabe in Zimbabwe should logically, historically and culturally, have been the first dictator to be made to topple.  Not doing so over many years, speaks more loudly about any moral imperative of gung ho attempts to oust dictators, than fine words in the newspapers or really slow rhetoric in the UN.

Nations tribes and other human groupings seem to  go through the process of civilisation at different speeds and in different ways. The Middle Ages in Britain must have been dirty cold and frightening times for many. We have  had our despotic kings and ruthless Oliver Cromwell types and  it has taken centuries from  1264 when Simon De Montford's mother of parliaments was founded, for our  method of government to mature into the parliamentary democracy we have today.

Morally can we really use brute force to compel  others to go at our speed rather than theirs, however despotic and cruel they are? In our own  self defence perhaps but otherwise...?

 Apart from self defence  or in defence of friends as in WWII,  perhaps a situation such as existed (exists?) in Afganistan is an exception namely where the regime ruthlessly seeks to subjugate and keep subjugated all the female part of the human race -  a real  crime against humanity.