Gadaffi murdered 189 Americans at Lockerbie. Gadaffi has already served notice that he is the one that needs to be removed.
The Chinese Communists are responsible for 100,000 dead GI's via the Korean and Vietnam Wars, neither of which would have occurred without their material support. They are currently one of our biggest trading partners. We normalized relations with them in the 1970's to counter the greater of two evils - the Soviet Union.
The entire Middle East is a sea of Islamism. Do we really want to open the Pandora's box of democracy in that context? Think of a supersized Gaza Strip run by Hamas. Hello, post-Mubarak Egypt. We are about to discover the key mistaken assumption of neo-conservatism, which is that everybody thinks like an American, and just wants to be let alone. Unfortunately, the reality in the Muslim world is that Muslims want not only to be closer to Allah, they want everybody else to be closer to Allah. Or else...
Rubin Reports on democracy in Arab states:
Remember the Iranian revolution (in 1979) when all sorts of people poured out into the streets to demand freedom? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is now president.Remember the Beirut spring when people poured out into the streets to demand freedom? Hizballah is now running Lebanon.
Remember the Palestinians having free elections? Hamas is now running the Gaza Strip.
Remember democracy in Algeria? Tens of thousands of people were killed in the ensuing civil war.
It doesn't have to be that way but precedents are pretty daunting.
What did Egyptians tell the Pew poll recently when asked whether they liked "modernizers" or "Islamists"? Islamists: 59%; Modernizers: 27%. Now maybe they will vote for a Westernized guy in a suit who promises a liberal democracy but do you want to bet the Middle East on it?
It's not that they're not ready for democracy - it's that we're not ready for the wars we'll have to fight once the Muslim masses get to decide their foreign policy.
...and replaced by radicals allied to those who killed more than 3,000 Americans.