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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rrufff who wrote (5147)	12/20/2003 10:18:21 AM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20773

The world has mostly forgotten Latin America the past 10-15 years (too bad, made some great money in stocks there this year) but it occurs to me it's a decent working model for what we have in mind. In the 1980's, LA was beset by extremists on the right and the left. US policy did some things right and some things really wrong, in terms of who we supported and what we tolerated. But over time, we made it pretty clear we wouldn't tolerate dictatorships of the left or the right. We motivated the OAS to take a similar stand, a critical factor in helping to change the mood in the region. Today LA has one dictator left. Some think we should buy him off instead of rattling more sabers, but Cuba will change over time regardless. Elsewhere you have a group of nations that "get it" where democracy is concerned, for the most part. Colombia may still collapse on us, and LA lacks the festering sore that the West Bank presents. Radical ideologies also died off for the most part - the generals stay in their barracks and the communists can't sign up thousands of peasant fighters these days. I never served in Latin America - can't say exactly how and why we "won" there, speaking in relative terms compared to the Middle East. But worth thinking about. Not coddling tyrants on either side has a lot to do with it.