Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: JohnM who wrote (52462)	10/16/2002 4:08:54 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Martin Kramer questions the proponents of Arab democracy. From his recent Address to the 2002 Weinberg Founders Conference: Now an American policy devoted to promoting democracy could strip the existing order of some of its legitimacy. In places where that legitimacy is particularly thin, such a policy could even precipitate regime change. I give America that much credit. But the question is, what comes next? And here we come back to the law of unintended consequences: if something can go wrong, it will. As the United States and Israel have just pursued a utopian peace process to its unintended consequence, it seems to me very appropriate to ask this: does anyone think that our tools of social engineering are any more precise when it comes to the democracy process? Are we so certain of the outcome that we can confidently take a jackhammer not only to the political structures of our enemies, but of our allies as well? To the promoters of democracy, I say, promise one thing: that the existing order will not be replaced by civil war as in Bosnia or Algeria or Lebanon. For bad as the Arab world is, it could get worse, and in fact it has been worse at various times and places. Almost everywhere, beneath the coercive order enforced by the regimes, there are precisely the same ethnic tensions that produced war in Bosnia, the same inter-faith hatreds that gave us war in Lebanon, or the same struggle for Islam that ended in civil war in Algeria. Can the doctors of democracy promise, first of all, to do no harm? geocities.com

To: JohnM who wrote (52462)	10/16/2002 4:30:52 PM
From: carranza2	Respond to of 281500

how can I go wrong? I think it's great, too, that's how you can go wrong. Seriously, Ambrose had a rare gift for making history come alive. The secret of his writing, I think, was to engage all of the reader's senses. You shiver with delight when he describes the sylvan scenes they saw; you quake with fear when they come up against Indians; you feel their discomfort the Corps felt when it was holed up for the winter; you feel their disgust at having to eat another piece of dried salmon; you can feel Coulter's animal fear and courage when he successfully ran away, naked, in winter from the Indians who were holding him; you share the cold they felt when they miscalculated the passage to the Pacific in winter..... Magnificent book.