Can I ragebait them?

Always 😄

US certainly had a bunch of illicit, criminal side quests

Lmao. Every bad thing that the US did was just a "side quest" that deviates from the overall pure and good intentions. Every bad thing the USSR did shows that they were inherently evil.

Mohammad Mossadegh was the progressive, peaceful, prime minister of Iran, who had zero alignment with the Soviets and only tried to assert Iran's autonomy over its natural resources against the British colonizers who had built their entire empire off of stealing Iranian oil - deposed by the CIA in the name of "anti-communism," and replaced by a literal monarch that spent decades hunting down and annihilating the Iranian left with secret police. But of course, that's just a "side quest."

Operation Condor, in which the US engaged in widespread election interference across South America, promoting right wing authoritarians and setting up "banana republics" to keep the cheap goods coming, that whole continent was just a little "side quest."

Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, where the US dropped massive amounts of chemical weapons on poor rice farmers trying to assert control of their own land and resources. Indonesia, the mass killings of hundreds of thousands of activists, teachers, ethnic minorities, etc, by the US-backed Suharto regime, once again, a regrettable little "side quest."

Exactly how many countries do you have to do "side quests" of terror and looting in the name of "stopping totalitarianism" do you have to do before they count as the "main quest?"