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

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (133886)	5/22/2004 11:12:16 AM
From: h0db	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Have you ever been to the Korean War memorial in DC? Do you ever ponder the tremendous loss of lives that resulted from Kim Il Sung's attempt to conquer the entire peninsula? There are other monuments to your impluse to impose, uncage, and empower through conquest. In the case of South Korea, what followed the war was more than three decades of dictatorship. The fact that it was not nearly as evil as the regime in P'yongyang does not make it democratic. The Korean War is where the phrase "...but he's OUR S.O.B" was born. South Korea indeed did prosper, and over the decades developed a middle class, rule of law--still evolving--and finally overthrew their US-backed military dictator. The fact remains, if you've read any history at all: the primary motivation of the United States in 1950 and beyond was containing Soviet expansionism, not expanding democracy. Where that occurred, it was a happy byproduct. Effect, not cause. We succeeded nowhere in imposing democracy. In most cases, if democracy occurred, it occurred despite our preferences. Iran is more democratic today than it was under the Shah. Central America is a monument of the failure of the United States to build democracy in our own hemisphere. Excluding Israel, our closest friends in the Middle East are among the most repressive regimes in the world. I'm about creating a political system h0db, not a political party. I want a governmental system that has a free marketplace of ideas from which the people of the world can pick and choose. And if, by chance, they find a particular political choice was wrong, or no longer meets their needs, then they will always have the right to vote it out of power. Is there something wrong with that? It is naive. Creating the conditions for democracy is a long, hard process. Want to transform a non-democratic society? Promote investment, business. Educate the children, particularly the girls, at least through the sixth grade. The most successful examples of democratization are places where US businesses in international trade ran rampant--but not to the extent of the United Fruit, Co. in Central America--without military meddling.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (133886)	5/22/2004 11:58:57 AM
From: boris_a	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

spreading, BY FORCE, THEIR "values" ... Maybe we should not forget that the Sovjets spread in Afghanistan a lot of what we all would call "modern values" (womens equal right, land reform, health care, education, modern justice system, saecularisation etc.) and everyone would support. Of course, they have not been very interested in democracy and stressed socialistic structures, but spreading own values is absolutely the norm for a colonial occupation. In Iraq, there's under the umbrella of guns a full blown privatization program running, very much according to neocon American values, just to give an example. All this progress in Afghanistan (and there was some) was coming to an end when the Taliban have been taking over with a little help of their friends and plunging these societies into abject poverty and misery .