Humm... I'm reviewing my TA charts, and reading/watcing the news of the day... SI is pretty much my diversion from those other actitivies (as well as an opportunity to exercise my grey matter)..
What are you doing flatulating on this message board??
Btw, I did 14 years in the service.. And many of my co-workers are former or retired military...
So how many years did you serve?
In fact, the list of countries and even regimes that have curtailed their worst human rights abuses is far.....How the hell did this happen?
Let me guess, it had nothing to do with the conduct of US foreign and military policy...
Intervening forcefully has been the least effective way to end human rights abuses.... it will not work in Iraq.
Well, apparently the other side felt that the most effective way of advancing their own power and control was through ENCOURAGING violations of human rights.
Because in all of those cases, those who sought to dominate and terrorize those societies possessed greater will (and coercive control over their population) than we did... Their will to dominate and tyrannize was greater than our will to prevent it, and/or to advance our own economic and political ideology....
One of these days maybe you'll understand that few political movements occur spontaneously, or survive without outside assistance.
Whether they be communist, Fascist, or Islamist, such political movements would seldom be sustainable without outside support...
Through persuation, sanctions, criticism, diplomacy, and ....Encourage and support the emergence of a middle class.
A middle class? Or a mercantilist class of powerful elites and their subservient bureaucratic facilitators, all acting to deny the general population the ability to advance their economic condition?
You want to advance the middle class? Then you have to create political and legal systems that empower it. You have to have property rights, and the legal and financial structures that permit that property to be made liquid and/or saleable..
And you don't have general property rights in a totalitarian or autocratic society, except what the political and economic elites permit.
That's why you don't have a middle class h0db.. Take some time and read Hernando De Soto's work on the topic...
It is not a matter of caring. It is about recognizing the limits of power.
Actually, it a matter of recognizing the limit of complacency, and the potential fallout of non-action becoming a far greater threat than military intervention.
North Korea is a threat. It's a threat to Japan, China, and of course, S. Korea. It is not a direct threat to the US, as of yet. It has no natural resources. It has little in the way of financial resources to carry out a massive terrorist agenda against its neighbors, let alone the world.. And it's political ideology has fallen into disrepute, with it being one of the final hold-outs..
But Islamic militancy is a rising force throughout the Mid-East. It's being fed by economic stagnation, political repression, and a demographic baby boom. It is in its ascendancy, not it's decline. And it perceives the millions of young people in the region as potential recruits and martyrs..
A human resource that the western world seemingly could care less about. A human resource that feels alienated, isolated, and dispossessed of any hope for a properous future because of the contemptible and corrupt political and economic system they live within. IOW, a potential army of holy warriors just waiting for the call to Jihad.
And now that Saddam has fallen, the country is a ripe target for an Islamic state.. Iraq, in fact, it's become the focus of Islamists throughout the region because they know that a democratic and/or progressive Iraq, armed with the second largest reserves of oil and an American patron, represents DIRECT COMPETITION for those latent human resources they are counting upon to wage their global Jihad..
Do you get that h0db? Do you understand that the youth of the middle east are looking for a future? That they are looking for some purpose to their miserable lives? That they really feel they have nothing to lose?
We don't have 20-40 years to create the kind of incremental change you claim to be advocating. The entire region is a demographic timebomb waiting to explode, bringing down the entire structure of stability in the region.
And when it falls, it's going to make the fall of the Shah of Iran look like a tea party.......
Hawk |
