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

To: NickSE who wrote (95030)	4/19/2003 11:46:18 PM
From: NightOwl	Respond to of 281500

Only after World War II did we get it right. Because of a remarkable set of leaders and strategists--Truman, Marshall, Acheson, Vandenberg, Nitze, Kennan--we turned, with our allies, relatively quickly and in good order, to fighting the next world war: in the conference halls where we assembled the Marshall Plan and the new era's institutions, on the battlefield in Korea, and in the battle of ideas against communism. More very good ideas. Bravo. But I would argue that "getting it right" has more to do with "circumstances," including the existence of a credible threat and the capacity to project power in response, than with the quality of leadership available. Don't forget this is the same crew that sowed the seeds of Vietnam and Korea post WWII. ...And this: *And once a nation solidly becomes a democracy it is generally at peace with its democratic neighbors--democracies almost never make war on one another.* Has all the earmarks of a great myth. Democracies may not have a long history of wailing on each other, but can you be sure that this is in the "nature" of democracy; or simply a result of the fact that a "leading" democracy is always capable of finding, or being found by, an external threat against which to rally the "coalition of democracies." Democracy certainly seems to be the organizational form of choice for societies able to join in a competition of mercantile/industrial/capital driven interests. But it could just as easily be argued that it's success in these venues is what drives "the competition" to find a better alternative. Moreover, as Woolsey suggests, it could be the very tendency of democracy to declare victory and withdraw to relish the "profits" which gives place for the rise of the "next best" competitor. 0\|0

To: NickSE who wrote (95030)	4/20/2003 11:52:23 PM
From: greenspirit	Respond to of 281500

Outstanding article Gostrider! I agree with it 100%.

To: NickSE who wrote (95030)	4/21/2003 12:20:53 AM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 281500

But the experts who tell us that Arabs will never be able to operate democracies are as wrong as those who have said the same thing about other cultures. There is really only one word for those who persist in such a view: racist. This is becoming the most popular straw man in conservative America. Anybody who has devoted even the most rudimentary study to the democratization process in the developing world knows that it is possible for any culture to operate a democracy, and that it is absurd to say that any culture will never be able to operate a democracy. The same sort of study also suggests, though, that the transition to democracy is likely to be an extended one, involving serious instability and possible recidivism to one-man rule before functioning democracy is achieved. It is also very likely that there will be stages in which the process of working out the kinks presents us with the difficult choice between intervening, and disrupting the democratic transition, or accepting policies that diverge from our interests. These are things we need to understand; if we don't understand them we will go into the process with ridiculously unrealistic expectations.