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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (19452)	7/26/2001 10:03:06 AM
From: thames_sider	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 82486

I'd say the US govt. (not just Bush) bears more blame for Afghanistan than you give, but less for the Balkans and Iraq. In Afghanistan, the US was not too bothered about who fought the Soviets, so long as they did... drug-runners, religious zealots, secular warlords, whoever. What the US didn't do effectively was work out who would actually be a 'good' leader - in, say, the Turkish sense, an Ataturk type - and support them while discouraging (or at least not funding/training/arming) the obviously vile types. As things were,if you support the most vicious fighters, you will not end up with the most civilised or tractable leaders afterwards, whoever wins. The US - and much of the West - is similarly guilty of funding and supporting Iraq against Iran, but this was perhaps less predictable. Hussein was never exactly a desirable leader <s> - standard military despot - but looked not hugely worse than most other ME leaders, at least co-operated with trade, and didn't encourage terrorism. Certainly his invasion of Kuwait managed to offend pretty much everyone in the region... Bush's mistake, perhaps, was not to overthrow him while actively backed by more than just the UK: but I'm not convinced this woudl really have been possible without huge cost (militarily and diplomatically) - the days are gone when the West could pick its own puppets for the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the Balkans have been a warring province since the first Celts moved in, and probably before... racially and religiously mixed, with cultures that cherish grudges, and a history of combat, invasion, foreign and federated rule - very like NI, actually... The West could have done better - but it's the flip side of Imperialism, now, we hold off from invading other countries to 'put them to rights' unless and until their troubles start spilling over: plus their arms have become rather more competitive than in the 'gun vs. spear' days. One solution would be to either force people to move to newly imposed borders, as was done (for example) in Poland after WWII - and to some extent, via the 'ethnic cleansing' (forced by exile and genocide) in the last Balkan wars. Another would be to split the current states into ethnically pure statelets. Either way, you'd need a large, neutral and committed peace enforcement body to restrict the borders - and I'm not sure they'd be any more popular than the British in NI, at that. And I can entirely understand why the US would not want its soldiers in that invidious position... Also, in the UK, there's tripartisan agreement that our troops should remain in NI as long as necessary to enforce 'peace': in the US, I'm not convinced that either side would refrain from making cheap political points against whichever sent in troops - 'sending our boys into someone else's war to die'...