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

To: neolib who wrote (182880)	3/4/2006 12:04:49 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Bush's Self-Evident Certitude By Michael Kinsley The Washington Post Friday, March 3, 2006 The case for democracy is "self-evident," as someone once put it. The case for the world's most powerful democracy to take as its mission the spreading of democracy around the world is pretty self-evident, too: What's good for us is good for others. Those others will be grateful. A world full of democracies created or protected with our help ought to be more peaceful and prosperous and favorably disposed toward us. There is no valid case against democracy. You used to hear a lot that democracy is not suitable for some classes of foreigners: simply incompatible with the cultures of East Asia (because deference to authority is too ingrained there) or the Arab Middle East (because everybody is a religious fanatic) or Africa (because they're too "tribal," or too predisposed to rule by a "big daddy" . . . or something). But this line of argument has gone out of fashion, pushed offstage by free and fair elections in some surprising places. Yet the case against spreading democracy -- especially through military force -- as a mission of the U.S. government is also pretty self-evident. American blood and treasure should not be spent on democracy for other people. Or, short of that absolute, there are limits to the blood and treasure the United States should be expected to spend on democracy elsewhere, and the nature of war makes that cost hard to predict and hard to limit. Furthermore, the encouraging discovery that free elections are possible in unexpected places has a discouraging corollary: If tolerance and pluralism and suchlike Western values are not essential preconditions for democratic elections, they are not the necessary result of elections either. The present debate over when to use American power in defense of democracies other than our own is at least more wholesome than the previous debate about using force to thwart or overthrow foreign democracies. The argument against tolerating communist governments elected fair and square used to be that the election that brought them to office would probably be the last. "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people," as Henry Kissinger put it. But today's concern about what we might call "nasty democracy" is in some ways more depressing. It is not that a regime will use democracy in the short run to stifle it in the long run. The danger is that democracy will reveal the people's true and continuing preference for a society with no place for all the other Western liberal values that our founding document calls "self-evident" (equality, freedom to pursue happiness and so on). Even worse, these societies may decide to export their distaste for Western values just as we try to export the values themselves -- and they may not agonize, Western-style, over the distinction between violent and nonviolent means of persuasion. Recent news has left us awash in examples: the triumph of Hamas in the Palestinian elections; the emergence of a similarly attractive group, the Muslim Brotherhood, as an electoral force in Egypt; and above all the result of the American-sponsored election in Iraq, which seems to be just about the opposite of the lion-and-lamb tranquility that democracy enthusiasts had hoped for. But if these developments gave President Bush any pause about his aggressive democratization project, he showed no sign of it Wednesday during his surprise drop-by in Afghanistan. From Bush's description, that legendarily bloodthirsty land has been transformed into something like Minnesota. It's a place where "men and women are respected" and "young girls can go to school" and "people are able to realize their dreams." We shall see. In his biography of Margaret Thatcher, the British journalist Hugo Young used the term "inspirational certainty" to describe the strength that some political leaders get from refusing to let anything change their minds. Thatcher had it, and so did Ronald Reagan. Bush would like to have it. But on this particular issue, at least, he can't because he actually has changed his mind. In the 2000 election he opposed what was then called nation-building -- and he opposed it for all the self-evident reasons. Now he supports it, for equally self-evident reasons. If the arguments for both sides of some policy question are self-evident, the correct answer must not be. But Bush avoids the trap of complication by taking his self-evident truths sequentially. Bush parries any challenge to explain his change of views with the simple assertion that Sept. 11, 2001, changed everything. It's easy to see how that day might have changed his opinion about the urgency of the war on terrorism. But how, exactly, is it supposed to have changed his opinion about the aggressive pursuit of democracy as a tactic in that war? We don't want a President Hamlet, publicly rehearsing his doubts as he leads the nation into battle. But the men and women risking their lives for democracy in Iraq deserve at least a tiny sense that the president who sends them there has considered the evidence against his policy and has some sense of why he rejects it. kinsleym@washpost.com

To: neolib who wrote (182880)	3/4/2006 1:51:22 PM
From: steve dietrich	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The fact is that the other two of the 3 axis of evil were much further along with WMD's. Who Knew, more likely Who Cared! Oops, attacked the wrong country!

To: neolib who wrote (182880)	3/4/2006 4:59:38 PM
From: skinowski	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Russia and Iran Can't really compare the two. Iran is still an aspiring superpower... Russia "grandfathered" herself into the club by becoming the second nuclear power after the US... back during the cold war. nuclearweaponarchive.org

To: neolib who wrote (182880)	3/4/2006 6:08:09 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hawk, you were not very concerned with FACTS when it was Saddam in your sights. The probability of Israel having WMD was much higher than of Iraq, even before we confirmed the matter by invading. What are you talking about? Whether Saddam had WMDs or not, it was HIS OBLIGATION under a binding cease-fire agreement that WILLINGLY agreed to. Of course, his only other option was to opt to maintain hostilities and have coalition forces overthrow him in 1991, rather than 2003. When he completely violated the cease-fire in 1998 by ceasing all cooperation with UNSCOM inspectors after they discovered a damning set of documents that directly called into question the credibility of Iraq's record of WMDs expended during the Iran-Iraq war, we had the right (obligation?) to re-commence hostilities at that time in order to force compliance. It mattered not whether Saddam actually possessed WMDs or not. What mattered was that almost every intelligence agency belonging to members of the UNSC unanimously agreed that Iraq was in material breach and no one could guarantee whether Saddam was in compliance or not. And even in March, 2003, after Saddam was granted a further 90 days to "fess up", UNMOVIC inspectors were forced to file a 176 page report disclosing STILL UNRESOLVED issues related to Iraq's WMD programs/inventory. And while many people may assert that Bush and the CIA "lied and deceived" the American people about Iraq's WMD programs, the reality is that every indicator that Saddam presented was that he was continuing his programs illicitly. And TO THIS DAY, we STILL DO NOT HAVE full accountability of Iraq's WMD inventory. All we have is an agreement by the Iraq Survey Group analysts and Subject Matter Experts (SME) that it's unlikely those inventories still exist. But it's not a guarantee, nor an actual physical or documentary accounting (and we all know that documents are ALWAYS correct and never misrepresent).. Bottom line.. NOW we know that Saddam doesn't possess the capability to use WMDs. But up until his overthrow, no one, not even his own generals, were certain about the actual status of Iraq's WMD inventory. And there's no evidence that can completely eliminate the possibility that WMDs weren't carried into Syria, despite the numerous rumours to that fact that we heard while I was with ISG. That's my view Neolib. I'm not perfect and never claimed to be. But I take umbrage when people accuse me of playing "fast and loose" with the facts. The reality is that no one can credibly state exactly what the status of those missing WMD inventories actually are. Hawk