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Politics : Israel to U.S. : Now Deal with Syria and Iran -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas M. who wrote (12099)	8/3/2006 5:21:48 PM
From: sea_urchin	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 22250

Thomas > the collapse of the neocon vision of forcible democratization does seem to glide rather effortlessly into an embrace of genocide and mass slaughter. The Yglesias article referred to exposes the futility, in fact the absurdity, of the neocon policy. One presumes the object of the exercise, if there is indeed an object other than the slaughter of Muslims and the theft of their land and oil, should be to end up with a liberal regime which can be managed with a minimum of force, not a permanent state of war or anarchy, as in Iraq and Afghanistan. Clearly, the neocons haven't gone further in their schemes and fantasies than making war. They presumed that when the supposedly "bad guys" were removed by force a liberal democracy would simply fall into place. Nothing could be further from the truth. yglesias.tpmcafe.com >>War really is the conduct of politics by other means. It makes no sense to worry about whether or not brutal measures "work" to "win" wars. The point of wars isn't to win -- it's to achieve something and you need to ask yourself what you're trying to achieve. This is the problem -- not that liberal doses of violence can't achieve anything, but that they can't achieve the specific things we're trying to achieve. The logic of pursuing a "transformative agenda" for the Middle East primarily through the use of force is that the entire Muslim world should be turned into a gigantic police state run by the United States of America. But, obviously, we're not going to do that, we shouldn't try to do that, and if we did try to do that we'd fail. Let me also say that a lot of conservatives are, I think, unduly impressed with authoritarianism. Liberalism is a remarkably effective system of government. America's liberal regime is way older and more stable than any authoritarian system in the world. The longest-lasting autocratic regime in the modern world was the Soviet Union clocking in at about 70 years. It's hard to know exactly how to count the ages of some of Europe's constitutional monarchies, but there are plenty of liberal regimes that have lasted longer than that. <<