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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (263874)	12/9/2005 12:32:41 AM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572460

"In fact, our recent history.....dating from 1980, suggests we are not at all well suited for empire building and bringing the world to an egalitarian point of view." In general, we tend to suck at nation building. When successful the results are quite good. But because we tend to want to do things on the cheap and quickly, we often fail. Those foreign policy failures you point to were the result of that wing who feels we need to have a "pragmatic" foreign policy. That wing is the same wing, albeit a bit more ideological and fundamentalist, that attacked Iraq nearly three years ago. And before that wing, there was the Eisenhower/Kennedy/Johnson wing that felt the need to do some policing action in Vietnam which morphed into a full fledge war. Then there was Korea, and all those minor interventions like Nicaragua, Columbia and El Salvador. Meanwhile, forget all the coup d'etats we helped orchestrate which typically worked to install more conservative, usually autocratic gov'ts in nations with which we felt some threat, real or otherwise. Since WW II, there have been so many minor and major military interventions orchestrated by the US, I wonder how we can say with a straight face that we are peace loving nation. It rarely is really pragmatic because it always revolves around short term advantage over long term goals. We backed Saddam because he was at war with the Iranians. We weren't nuts about Saddam, so we supplied him just enough so he wasn't losing or gaining ground. We bought some time, but that was about it. And too much of our foreign policy is exactly the same. Bought time for what? What was the reason for buying time with Iran? Look.....I am not naive. A nation instinctively wants to look out for its own self interest and the bigger and more powerful the nation, the more likely that nation will do what it can to protect and enhance that self interest. But then, I can't buy into the notion that that same nation is the best one to bring egalitarianism into the world........even if we are the best of the lot. If we can't rise above the part of us that seeks out war; prospers when we are at war; thrives when we are fighting, then I don't think we can do a good job of bringing freedom and democracy to the world. And I certainly think there are more constructive ways to accomplish that goal rather than starting a war. ted