berge, you are certainly very selective with your facts (or else implausibly naive). I doubt you are naive, as you seem to be an intelligent person based on your stock-related posts. I just don't think it is helpful in any debate to pick out broad-brush smearing tidbits of fact to justify your world views.
Let's take as a given that all nations (including the U.S.) are acting for the most part in their own self-interest. Now, let's take the first statement that France, Germany and Russia are arming terrorist nations. Let's take Saddam's Iraq, as I am asuuming that is the "terrorist nation" you are referring to. From a purely moral standpoint in a vaccuum, arming this ruthless dictator was genuinely abhorrent. But, you would have to include U.S. in this group as we propped him up in the first place. Now, don't get me wrong - I think from a Machiavellian standpoint, we had some justification for doing so, as we needed this strong man to contain that other loony nation, Iran. It could very well be argued that more good than harm was done by installing this equalizing force. Of course there are innumerable comlexities involving the U.S. history with Iraq in the last 30 years. I'll tell you what was not one of them: Iraq having weapons of mass destruction by themselves or with which Iraq was about to attack U.S. interests. At the time we took on the task of ousting Saddam, we and the U.N. had him satisfactorily contained and things were relatively stable in that part of the world. Now that we have the job "done", Iraq is a quagmire with U.S. troops getting killed at a higher rate post-job than pre-job. Iraq has become an anarchic terrorist haven and a flashpoint for anti-U.S. sentiment throughout the Islamic world, and throughout parts of the non-Islamic world. And, guess what, the real culprit, Osama, is still watching satellite TV and following our election closely. The U.S. took its eye off the ball by going into Iraq. There is no excuse for limiting the manpower on the hunt for Osama. Going into Iraq, quite clearly has done more harm than good. In the pro-Bush utopian myth, "we went in there, ousted a dictator and started a happy democracy." In the real world, well, see above.
Not only was invading Iraq at the time and in the manner we did it bad for international relations, it was bad from a purely operational standpoint. Bush and his team squandered valuable goodwill with other nations (as you know, goodwill is a valuable form of capital in business; likewise, it has immense value in the political arena) for an operational folly. Not only that, he did it by feeding the U.S. population a bunch of bullshit about imminent threat of attack via WMDs.
Now, to address the simpler question of your post. No, those are not the ideas I was referring to. I was speaking more generally about showing some mutual respect. But, as far as the Iraq war issue, as an example, letting the weapons inspectors finish their jobs, and perhaps with more tact and negotiation, we could have swayed more countries to join us in the Iraq war if it later made sense (i.e. Iraq was a true danger).
Berge, you know as well as I do that the mere fact of a brutal dictatorship is not the reason the U.S. decides to invade a country. That is just a facile after-the-fact campaign slogan to throw out some semblance of justification.
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