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

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (83520)	3/18/2003 7:43:53 PM
From: quehubo	Respond to of 281500

<<Truth is, for every democracy the U.S. has set up, we've set up 20 tyrants.>> Better to keep Saddam and his victims contained than take a chance that this will be one of the 20 huh? When was the last tyrant set up? No hope that we have learned from the past and that we can do better in the future I see? The USSR may have been doomed, but the USA limited the scope of the damage and accelerated its demise. President Reagan's leadership has made a new much better world for hundreds of millions. Perhaps the world will fare as well with the leadership of President Bush.

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (83520)	3/19/2003 12:32:48 PM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

The Eastern bloc countries had a hand in their own liberation, to be sure, but even they believe that we were primarily responsible for liberating them, which is why they are taking Bush's side in the present crisis. Maybe Vaclac Havel and Lech Walesa know something you don't. I mention the Eastern bloc countries as examples of places recently tyrannized that, with the help of the United States, rapidly established democratic institutions. It is irrelevant whether we occupied them or not. Here is a list of the members of the British Commonwealth. How many are democratic? Antigua and Barbuda Australia Bangladesh Barbados Belize Botswana Brunei Darussalam Cameroon Canada Cyprus Dominica Fiji Islands Ghana Grenada Guyana India Jamaica Kenya Kiribati Lesotho Malawi Malaysia Maldives Malta Mauritius Mozambique Namibia Nauru New Zealand Nigeria Pakistan Papua New Guinea Samoa Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Solomon Islands South Africa Sri Lanka St Kitts and Nevis St Lucia St Vincent and the Grenadines Swaziland The Bahamas The Gambia Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tuvalu Uganda United Kingdom United Republic of Tanzania Vanuatu Zambia Zimbabwe thecommonwealth.org Using the Freedom House ratings, which also evaluate press freedom and other civil liberties, and eliminating the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand from the list, and using 2000 as a benchmark year, we find: 56% are rated "Free"; 30% are rated "Partially Free"; and 14% are rated "Not free". freedomhouse.org As I have demonstrated that your estimates of "for every good thing" there are "10 bad" are unreliable, to say the least, I will not get into the question of how many tyrants we are responsible for. I will come back with some information of Chile, a bit later, though. In any event, I did not adduce Pinochet and Franco as instances of "nation building", but as instances where authoritarian regimes led pretty easily to a transition to democracy. Whether someone is capable of self- government or not does not depend on whether he is Asian or African, but on the degree of social development that there is at a given time. Sometimes, in order to establish stability enough to allow for institutional growth and economic development, imperialism has not been a bad thing. To note that does not make me an imperialist any more than my noting that a lot of good people were Marxists makes me a socialist.