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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: George Papadopoulos who wrote (919)	9/22/2001 8:34:21 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Sure...as long as we support them in suppressing their own people despite of our values crap (democracy, freedom, human rights, etc.) George, George.. George... It's so hard to believe that you are that naive. We make do with what is available... We didn't invent the oppression in these various nations... It existed before we arrived there, and many cases, like Vietnam, became more ruthless after we departed. Look at what this country has done over this century alone.. We have fought two world wars, and after the last one, we rebuilt the economies of our sworn enemies, and completely restructured their political systems. And US corporations have turned such wastelands like Saudi Arabia and Libya into major oil producers, only to have our assets "nationalized" by the very governments who wish to confiscate everything that US capital and technological know-how created for them. We rush around the world playing political "fireman", such as in Bosnia and Kosovo, and the American Red Cross is active throughout the world. We created the peace corps, staffed it with volunteers and send them around the world to provide economic and technological development assistances to poor nations. We've responded, often belatedly, to massacres such as occurred in Ruwanda and economic turmoil in Haiti. We supported UN efforts in E. Timor (which many try to blame on us)... And we permit hundreds of thousands of migrant workers to enter US borders to work in this country, helping nations like Mexico deal with the pressures of their own economic lethargy. And we have millions of people every year trying to emigrate to this country, either legally or illegally. And yes.. they ARE fleeing the economic poverty that exists in their own countries. But we didn't create that poverty, and in those states where the US has played a major roll, the local economy INEVITABLY benefits far more than would have been the case had we not been present. Overall, you'll be hard put to provide an example where a US presence has been detrimental over the long-term to a nation's growth and political liberalization. And I know a lot more about the Balkans that you give me credit for. And I know that when Milosevic came to power following the death of Tito, he advanced the interests of Serbs over those of the various other ethnicities in the country. This created the impetus for the break up of that nation which Tito had managed to hold together for 40 years (he was a Croatian), often ruthlessly repressing the individual national interests in order to subjugate them to the Federal Republic. When the Balkans started to shatter into it various ethnic components, the US had been reducing its European deployments and commenced cutting back it involvement on the continent. European "leadership", eager to prove they could manage their own backyard, took the lead toward trying to resolve the problems. But they failed. And the US was forced to step in, after CNN kept flashing these pictures of the horrible bombardments of Sarajevo by the Serbs... And then we catch the heat because no one liked our "solution".. Well, George... I didn't see Greece or Macedonia spending the hundreds of millions of dollars that the US spent in trying to bring a semblance of peace to that region... So as far as I'm concerned, they know what they can do with their complaints. It's pretty obvious that your concept of "helping" these nations consists of having the US go in an occupy them as we did with Japan... bashing some heads together, and bearing the brunt and obligation of coercing them into becoming democracies.. But you need to face some facts... The reason the US is a democracy in the first place is because we benefitted from some of the most enlightened philisophical thinkers in existence at the time of our nation's founding. WE ARE DIFFERENT... We think diffferently from the rest of the world... We have different values that are universally accepted by all Americans, regardless of our race or creed. We are all here as a result of the desire of our ancestors to escape those regimes that deprecated the value of the invidual, subverting it to the goals of the nobility, or the autocrats. You can't just instill such values in people who have no idea of what those values are worth. And as you stated, you must create sufficient economic vitality that people have time to reflect upon the worth of such values, rather than just struggling to survive from day to day. Democracy must come from within... It must come from the hearts of people who are fed up with being oppressed by the corrupt elements in their societies. And they must realize that human and civil rights extend to everyone, not just the party or ethnicity that happens to be in power at the time. Hawkmoon