You are forgetting the Nedlog Rule: no matter what a nation does, America has done worse.
The irony is that America’s actions during the Cold War were barely even tepidly evil. There was deep ambiguity over dealing with tyrants even at the time, but given that most of the planet was controlled by one or another, it’s not like we had a choice. Moreover, 50 years later we can say that those nations which dealt with America over Russia are free-er and wealthier and more democratic. Those who explicitly rejected the USSR when they could also tended to follow this path. If the Cold War was not nice, it wasn’t a scene of gross evil day after day.
Plus, I’ve never been very understanding of the idea that war is some excercise in fairness. If the enemy can’t match you in some way, you use that advantage to beat the living crap out of him. War should never be a fair fight, and most of the big, legendary battles in history occured when armies manuevered themselves into a situation where neither could back down and had no choice but to fight. The Cold War was about us taking advantage of the USSR’s weaknesses, and so what? That’s the entire point of the war.
That was perhaps the lesson that McNamara never understood about Vietnam. He kept trying to fight it as a war on the enemy’s terms, and that’s a losing psoposition any way you slice it.