March 22, 2006
Coffee break...back to Derbyshire
More hasty thoughts on this...
1. He's oh so stasist.
2. Introducing democracy is not "social engineering," except for the initial set-up. Rather, it's giving people the means to do their own social engineering. And the initial results in Iraq and Afghanistan say that that this is something people take to. They "get it," without an unreasonable amount of teaching and prodding.
3."...THWTHs are more inclined to the old British-imperialist notion that up to a fairly distant point (suttee and thuggee being beyond that point) peoples in foreign parts should be left alone to practice their own disgusting folkways, so long as they did not impinge on our interests..."
Sorry, don't work any more. The world is grown too small. Ignoring distant countries is now equivalent to, in the old Imperialist days, ignoring a distant British county. Yorkshire can't be left to Thuggee...
4. "...We don’t particularly care whether the Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds of Iraq put down their arms. We only want them to put down their arms against us. Henry Kissinger .... famously said of the Iran-Iraq War that it was a pity both sides couldn’t lose. One doesn’t want to be accused of inhuman callousness; but I am willing to confess, and believe I speak for a lot of THWTHs (and a lot of other Americans, too) that the spectacle of Middle Eastern Muslims slaughtering each other is one that I find I can contemplate with calm composure...."
Trouble is, a lot of the people we are worrying about have emerged from previous wars and slaughters. Afghanistan in particular. Chechnia, or tribal Pakistan...On the other hand, consider that India has about 130 million Muslims. How many of them have you heard of joining al Qaeda? How many of them are in Gitmo? I would contend that democracy is the most powerful weapon in our arsenal.
Update: "...the spectacle of Middle Eastern Muslims slaughtering each other is one that I find I can contemplate with calm composure." Why not. They're not people, just cartoon characters wearing towels on their heads, with evil smirks, hooked noses, and holding bombs with fizzing fuses..
Continually amazed, here, that otherwise bright people DO NOT GET the strength of democracy.
Posted by: Scott Chaffin at March 22, 2006 02:54 PMA footnote to the Iran-Iraq War. Victory for either side would have had devastating long-term consequences for the region and the world.
The danger posed by a metastasized Saddamite thugocracy should be obvious. But victory for the Ayatollah would have been worse - an Islamofascist megastate straddling vast oil reserves. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia would have disappeared in the next bite, and there was nothing we could have done about it.
When lefties insist that Saddam was our ally or friend or buddy, they ignore the real world context. The Reagan administration provided just enough help, largely in the form of satellite info, to ensure that the war was fought to grisly standstill. Both sides exhausted their imperialist ambitions for the time being.
From the standpoint of regional security and US foreign policy, it was the best possible outcome. They both lost. And the Reagan administration bought time to deal with the primary global threat, the Soviet empire.
They bought time, but time ran out on 9/11.
Posted by: lyle at March 22, 2006 11:55 PM
