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

To: D. Long who wrote (100692)	6/8/2003 11:41:18 AM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<That whole Cold War thing.> Yes, this is an important part of the current apology for making tyranny and calling it freedom. The claim is, "it's all different now, the Cold War's over, so we no longer need to make lesser-evil compromises". Several problems with this: 1. When our army has gone into third world nations, post-Cold-War, we are 0-for-2, so far, on making democracy: Afghanistan and Kuwait. Since we have indefinitely put off elections, and the withdrawal of our army, from Iraq, it's increasingly clear we are going to be 0-for-3. 2. When looking at the methods and ideology used post-Cold-War, all that's happened is, the CIA manuals have had the word "communist" replaced with "islamist". Nothing else has changed. The rhetoric used to demonize Islamists is identical, word for word, to that used to demonize Communists. And I see us doing the same kind of "lesser-evil" compromises we did in the Cold War: arming Afghan warlords, making nice with the Mujahedeen Khalq. 3. When looking at the methods and ideology used pre-Cold War, in the period 1898-1945, again, there are astonishing parallels to current events. When I looked at Mark Twain's criticism of our colonial conquest of the Phillipines, and the Administration's rhetoric justifying it ("bringing christianity and civilization to the savages, liberating the oppressed from Spanish tyranny"), it sounds amazingly like the discussion of the current war. Mark Twain's criticisms of the war 105 years ago, can be used, unchanged even in the details, to criticize this war. The context of history, is that the U.S. has been an imperial power since 1898, and only the details and enemies have changed in that time.