We may be arguing in agreement.
I would hope so.. There will be many "right" ways to achieve the same goal.. An Iraqi government that is accountable to its people, rather than merely a select and brutal elite.
the entire population has been operating under a system of bribes and corruption for at least the last 20 years. How quickly do you expect them to transition out of the mentality? Where there's money there will be corruption. And those that keep the accounts will be corrupted.
No doubt about it.. Always has been that way (look at the luxurious palaces Saddam built and his huge war machine)..
But the difference is that BEFORE the Iraqi people had no REAL claim to that oil. Saddam and his Baathist party owned it. If you weren't on their "buddy list" you didn't get any benefits.
But now the Iraqi people will have an EXPECTATION of receiving rewards.. And when they don't they will have the motivation of forcing the government leadership to explain itself to the people, or risking an outright revolt.
There you go,... ~You have to govern yourselves as long as it's the way we tell you to. That reminds me of Rumsfeld saying that we will not allow an Islamic state like Iran has. Really. If they want one, you're going to prohibit it and how is that self governing.
No.. there you go in trying to that I'm against an Islamic state, ELECTED by the people.. And that's just not true.. What I'm against is electing a non-democratic form of government that will subsequently act to eliminate the very mechanism that brought it to power in the first place. It's the very mechanism, fair and opposed democratic elections, that MUST BE PRESERVED so that the people have the ability (outside of armed revolt) for changing the form of their government.
If they want to elect an Islamist government, then that's their choice. If they want to vote to wage Jihad and attack the Western world, that's their choice.. A choice, the repercussions of which, can only be rightly blamed upon themselves.
And if that Islamist state enacts sexually and racially biased policies, they can discern for themselves whether they wish to continue to support such a government..
But knowing a little about about the history of democracy in the past 200 years, we generally know that people vote their pocketbooks and seldom choose to set their nation on the course of imperial agression.
The overall goal of the US foreign policy in the region must be the establishment and preservation of the electoral process as well as a legal framework that encourages a PEACEFUL AND TOLERANT marketplace for the exchange and selection of ideas and values.
And NO ONE should be able to logically state this is somehow inherently wrong or unjustifiable.
People generally don't want democracy. People want to be left alone to do what they want. Anarchy doesn't do that very well. If nothing else, you're neighbors won't leave you alone.
I completely disagree with you. People want to inherently make their own decisions without being told by someone else what they can, or cannot, do... No one likes being told what to do..
But the extreme form of Democracy is Anarchy, where everyone does what they want to do, regardless of the consequences and infringements upon the rights of others.
There is, as our history had displayed, a line that must be drawn between liberty and social order. And progress is measured by the relative non-volatile bias towards increasing liberties.
Hawk |
