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

To: frankw1900 who wrote (43184)	9/11/2002 9:03:06 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

So the simple thing would be to conquer the country, eliminate Hussein, the Baath party, and the secret police. Then hold municipal elections as soon as possible, administer the country while it organizes some real political parties, assembles an honest, or nearby honest, voters' roll and have an election. I can tell you have little exposure to the nature of 3rd world pseudo-democracy and its consequences. The problem that arises when developing countries try to convert to western-style democracy is that many of these countries aren't "nations" in the sense that we understand nationhood. They are sets of wildly different cultures, often ones violently disliking each other, with their borders defined not by their own relations, but by the collisions of colonial powers generations ago. In many cases they have only been held together by force. In most cases individual loyalty is not to the abstract concept of a nation but to the individual clan or ethnic group. Try to establish political parties and democratic structures in an environment like this and you will see them very quickly coopted into devices for furthering the interests of one ethnic group at the expense of others. Political parties do not break down by ideology, they break down by ethnicity, with predictable consequences. None of this is unnatural. In Europe centuries of bloodshed were required before the various groups could settle on collectively acceptable national boundaries. In the developing world this process was interrupted by colonists, who drew their own boundaries to suit their own convenience, and enforced them with force. When the colonists pulled out, dictators took over, and held the constituent parts of their "nations" together by force. Take force away and the irrationally lumped communities will resume the natural process of finding their own borders, which often involves a good deal of bloodshed and chaos. We have seen this happen all over the world. Unfortunately, in this case bloodshed and chaos will inevitably be exploited by the Islamists, and we can't afford to let that happen.