That is the rub, isn’t it?

I’m the last person to engage in relativistic sophistry — on a
sliding scale, the US is far and away more rights-respecting than,
say, N Korea, Iran, or pretty much any nation that we’ve engaged in
hostilities with since the end of WWII — but certainly, we have
not been uniformly rights-respecting, and certainly aren’t at this
point in time.

The more problematic aspect of the situation is more pragmatic:
we just don’t have a good track record as a nation of building
democracies. As a rule, we tend to know very little about the
conflicts in places we invade and assume shared values where those
values don’t necessarily exist. Iraq was supposed to be an Arab
Israel, and it was supposed to get to that point 1-2 years after
the initial invasion. I dunno what you’d call post-Saddam Iraq, but
“rights-respecting” isn’t a phrase that comes to mind.