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

To: FaultLine who wrote (68958)	1/27/2003 1:48:36 AM
From: frankw1900	Respond to of 281500

We tend to want to go immediately to "one man, one vote." However we did write a constitution for Japan that was so damn good they still love it. But the point is, lets not be in too much of a rush to try to turn these Middle East countries into an American suburb. The Foundation for Democracy - I think that's what it's called - which is associated loosely with the State Department has been running programs in Northern no fly zone. These programs have been about civil rights, local democratic forms, and so forth.. Apparently these have been fairly well received; are popular with young people; and the folk there are starting to take them up. The Japanese constitution was popular because it had the Emperor's imprimatur. There is no sort of a guarantee like that in Iraq, but if the Iraqis sat down with the idea, 'lets make a constitutional arrangement such that we aren't going to screw each other blind when the going gets tough', then they could well be successful. They've had the horrible example of Saddam to contemplate for quite a while - he played 'em off against each other. Except for the present winners, (who are going to have trouble just surviving if the government changes), there's no guarantee the major part of the country will want the existing kind of arrangement. The Kurds seem to like democracy and appear to be adapting to it, the Shiites haven't made any large statements against it and have the negative example of the Iranian experience to look at and, of course, the the Saddam example as well. The Sunnis would be happy to go along with any sort of arrangement which meant the Kurds and Shiites wouldn't gang up on them. There is no sensible point of going into Iraq expecting to see democracy arrive as from Zeus's forehead but neither is it sensible to imagine democracy is something the folk there can't make work. Genocidal disasters such as happened in Ruanda that Chua examines, happen because the leaders of the larger part of the population give permission and encouragement to the population to murder the minority. The payoff is getting to steal the minority's property. The leadership gets away with this because no powerful outsider nails down the genociders as they start the propaganda campaign. This is what happened in Yugoslavia. There was a great deal of alarm when Milosevich first started his Greater Serbia political campaign but no outside powers stepped up to do anything about it even though there were plenty of correct predictions about where it was likely to go. It was not a new thing in modern European history. Of course, the very overvalued UN Charter, I'm told by some apparently liberal people, forbids an intervention into a genocidal situation by countries having goodwill, unless the UN OKs it. The UN hasn't been OKing much lately, I notice. In fact the UN appears to be a mechanism for facilitating genocide -cf. Ruwanda, Kosovo. It seems to me unlikely the Iraqis would slip into this mode if the US was there for very long. The basic culture is trading and business oriented and folk would just be too busy rebuilding and making money to be enticed into further slaughtering each other and any sort of sensible US influence would further discourage such activity.