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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (36121)	3/22/2004 8:23:57 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 793900

we must do what we can to promote Democracy where possible in the region Sometimes I think we worry too much about promoting democracy and not enough about promoting the rule of law and decent economic management. The UAE are not democracies, but they are the best-run countries in the Arab world, and they are not threatening anybody. They will come to democracy in their own good time. If Saudi Arabia became a democracy today the most likely result would be civil war and a Wahabbi dictatorship. I'd much rather see them move in the direction that Dubai has taken. Americans often see democracy as a simple thing, a mere matter of writing a constitution and holding an election. It's not that easy. The US had plenty of growing pains, including epic genocide and a civil war of African proportions, before emerging as a stable democracy. It took Europe several centuries of appallingly bloody war to establish stable national boundaries, and two world wars before democracy prevailed. It ain't easy. I would agree that we cannot negotiate with terrorists. What I'm seeing lately, though, is a tendency to lump the entire Muslim world into a single category. I constantly see generic references to "The Muslims", "The Arabs", "The Saudis", "The Pakistanis", etc. Any conclusion based on this sort of collective reference is useless. All of these entities are divided, and these divisions are things we need to exploit. They aren't all terrorists, or terrorist sympathizers, and isolating the terrorists and their sympathizers needs to be a primary objective. We can't negotiate with terrorists, but there are plenty of people in the Muslim world that we can negotiate with. Has anybody noticed that the fundamentalist parties were trounced in the Malaysian elections? Personally, I think it's about time for a change in tactics. We've run about as far with military force as we can. For better or worse, we're in Iraq, and for better or worse, we will be getting out as soon as we can, regardless of the consequences. That's done already. We have no further attractive targets for military action: a move on Syria or Iran would not come out on the positive side of any reasonable cost-benefit analysis. We've made the point: everybody knows we have force and we're not afraid to use it. It's time to start repairing the severely damaged relationships with people whose cooperation we need. It's going to be a long haul. It is, and we have to recognize that. We also have to recognize that we can't do it alone. It may feel good to flash the rest of the world the finger and tell them that we don't care what they think. Unfortunately, in the long run we do have to care.