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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (9124)	5/19/1999 8:38:00 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 17770

The United States supported plenty of regimes that survived or have become more democratic. Would it have helped to have let them become part of the Soviet bloc? The ridiculous notion that only "authoritarian" regimes kept these nations out of the Soviet bloc is precisely what I am trying to deflate. In fact our support for "authoritarian" regimes was responsible for pushing many nations toward - and in some cases into - the Soviet bloc. A person of such superior attainments should have run for higher office, or entered the State Department. Think of all of those wasted decades when it was all so obvious! How could you have left them in the dark?... I wish I could claim to be so perceptive, but I can't. It was widely written about, widely analyzed, widely discussed, and the only people who didn't see it coming were those who wilfully blinded themselves with ideology - as destructive on the right as it is on the left - and refused to see it. Same with the fall of Chiang Kai-Shek, and the emergence of the Vietnam War. Americans in China who dealt with both Mao and Chiang reported that Chiang was doomed, and no amount of American support could save him. Americans in Vietnam at the close of WWII predicted that support for a French return to Indochina would lead to all out war between Americans and Vietnamese. They were not clairvoyant, they were observant; the armchair ideologues in DC purged the bearers of the bad news and went their merry way. I arrived in the Philippines for the first time in '79; it was wildly and blatantly obvious from simple observation and some basic reading that Marcos was in an irrevocable downward spiral. The State Department as an official entity couldn't see it until he was already gone, though many of their people on the ground here saw it very plainly. More accurately, they could see it, but their ideological fixations made it impossible for them to admit to what they saw. It is an axiom of foreign policy that one deal with the regime in place. Of course. And if one doesn't like the regime in place, one bounces it out and puts a new regime in place. And if the people in that country don't like that regime, you ship the regime plenty of bullets to shoot them with, and "public safety" instructors to teach the regime "interrogation techniques": do you remember the USAID torture teachers, or would you rather not? And when the people get pissed off, support your enemies, and burn your embassy, you denounce them as communists, arrange with the local bank to loan several billions to the regime (which pockets most of it), and send more bullets. Pretty soon you've made yourself an enemy. You talk as if we created the regimes, or as if we eliminated the democratic option from the menu... In many cases we did create the regimes, and openly encouraged them to eliminate the democratic option. For an excellent example, read Raymond Bonner's Waltzing With a Dictator. In many - indeed most - developing countries, basic social change is desperately needed to bring the countries out of the feudal and colonial sink in which they've been wallowing for centuries. In the wake of WWII, with the collapse of colonialism and the general improvement in communication and perception, pressure for change in these countries began escalating, as it should have: people were sick and tired of living in poverty while a few overblown thieves ran the country for their own purposes. Social change has always involved some degree of disorder, and always will. The US made the critical mistake of equating all disorder with subversion, and all desire for change in the status quo with communism. We sided with the archaic elites in trying to bottle up the tides of change, and we were every bit as successful as Canute. Do you ever wonder why so many people in the 3rd word dislike America? Do you think they are all just victims of commie propaganda? We fucked up badly in some cases. The least we can do is be big enough to admit it and try to make amends, instead of sticking our heads in the sand and pretending we didn't do what we did. I agree that this has nothing to do with race. It has a great deal to do with nationality. Given your obvious sympathy with those of other races, could you perhaps explain to me how we can justify imposing brutal and rapacious dictatorships on nations who do not want or need them purely because it fits our perception of our geopolitical imperatives? Could you explain to me how, if we insist on following such a course, we can expect the people of those countries not to hate us and ally themselves with our enemies? I am also a conservative. How does a conservative respond when he finds a friend, who committed the error of advocating a boycott of an obviously rigged "election", hogtied on the beach with two dozen knife wounds in his body? How does he respond if he has to be the one to retrieve the body, shielded to some small degree by white skin and a press card, because everybody else who knew the man is afraid that being publicly identified with him might lead them to the same fate? How does he respond if he sees that the officials in question work hand-in-glove with the security apparatus of his own country? How does a conservative respond when he sees public officials using the army and police to appropriate businesses and properties belonging to others? How when he sees Public officials slipping billions in borrowed money into Swiss accounts, leaving the taxpayers stuck with the bill? And on, and on, and on... Multiply those by many thousands, and you have the reality of "authoritarian" regimes. If you think this was a gain for democracy, you must have been very far away from it all. That is a true story, and I apologize if I get emotional over it; it is an emotional memory. My guess is that your conservative reaction, if you were actually in one of these countries at the level where the effects of these policies were felt, would have been exactly what mine was, exactly what Gen. Stilwell's was when faced with the reality of Chiang Kai-Shek. It would make you itch to pick up a gun and shoot somebody.