However, I'm still trying to figure out how you think your going to prevail when you're afraid to even get your hands dirty. The only fighting I see you doing is fighting for more excuses not to try and seek dramatic and progressive change in the mid-east.
Hawk, you should go back and study reactions among the founders of this country to the revolution in France. Particularly Jefferson and Adams' reactions. The former was enthusiasically supportive, even through the Jacobin years. The latter was pessimistic from the start--the French, Adams said and wrote, were incapable of a democratic or republican government because they had always lived under an autocratic monarch. They were dependent on it, they weren't used to ruling themselves, their institutions revolved around it, their customs didn't allow for it. It could only blow up. Adams--like Hamilton and unlike Jefferson--was of course ambivalent about republican govt anyway, and thought that a mixed govt with a monarch would have been best, rather like Britain. But like most others, he knew that the British model would have been impossible in America. Although he was a pretty inflexible kind of guy tempermentally, he tried to make do with a second or even third best govt, because it was the best given the circumstances that he found himself in. The political and personal differences between Adams and Jefferson led to a sharp break in their friendship that lasted for a couple of decades. When they were old, they finally reapproached each other through the good offices of a mutual friend, Benjamin Rush, and exchanged quite a few letters.
Jefferson wrote among many other things that Adams was right about the French Revolution, and he--Jefferson-- had been wrong.
Change of the sort you and others are contemplating is always tricky, and violence of the sort that the US has done is rarely successful in bringing about something positive. |
