On May 11, 2005, at 3:15 PM, Dan Minette wrote:
[interventions of various types]
But, it has worked a number of times, as well as not having worked a number of times.
Has it? Apart from Germany and Japan post WWII, when in the history of the US have we been successful in installing a democratic model of government in any nation? (I'm really asking; I might well have forgotten some things!)
Well, there's the Phillipeans, Tawain, and South Korea, and Panama, to name
countries outside of Europe.
I guess I should have clarified; I was thinking particularly of the kinds of actions such as we're seeing in Iraq. Panama I'd plain forgotten about -- Taiwan belongs to China, doesn't it? I'm not familiar with what happened in the Philippines (unless you're referring to WWII events), and IIRC South Korea was asking for border enforcement help, not assistance overthrowing its own government.
For the most part I don't see many examples of US-forced "regime change", though there certainly are cases where we've helped nations that needed it. What is happening in Iraq doesn't constitute such an action, IMO.
Western Europe and Japan are classic examples of this.
Japan was beaten. Much of Western Europe was already skewing democratic
pre WWII.
Well, let's look at the larger countries. Italy was first a monarchy and
then Facist before WWII, there was only a brief democracy in Germany before
the Facists came.
The Nazis were voted into place. That's rather ironic.
Since the US didn't control Spain, it took decades for that country to become a democracy. Austria was part of Germany before WWII started.
Only after the Anschluss in 1939. Prior to that it was -- what, another monarchy?
I think that democracy on mainland Europe can best be seen as a recent experiment with results that were mixed, at best.
Ah, but earlier you were talking about "Western Europe", not mainland Europe, and that includes nations such as Switzerland, Finland, Holland, the UK, etc. Mainland Europe is a far more limited geographic and national range.
And we had the backing of the rest of the allied forces in both cases (post-Nazi Germany, post-imperial Japan) to help us.
I think Japan was a solo show. Britian helped a little in Europe, but that
was about it.
I'd bet it was a lot more than Britain that helped rebuild Europe. Japan might have been pretty much us + them + no one else; I don't think any part of Asia was in a position to help Japan after WWII. I'm pretty sure no part of Asia would have *wanted* to help Japan at that time.
Times were probably a bit simpler as well. There were no pro-Nazi or pro-Hirohito terrorist training camps; the context and the nature of the enemy have both changed considerably in the last six decades.
But, there were pro-Nazi terrorists for a couple of years.
Were there? Wow, I missed that part.
We had a lot tighter control there than in Iraq, so I don't think they could hide a camp, but there were terrorists.
Influence is a far cry from direct frontal assault.
It is. But, one question I asked myself is whether our willingness to directly assult a dictator in Panama increased our influence in getting other dictators to retire elsewhere in Latin America.
A good point. And now, a century later, it's clear that Cuba, for one, has learned its lesson. ;)
And it is not our
responsibility to "fix" the world, particularly as there are still many
parts of it that don't *want* our kind of fixing in the first place.
Well, we know that the governments would like things to stay as they will.
How do we know that people don't want to vote if they can't?
The question sidesteps the point, which is that we do not have the right to compel other nations to adopt a democratic model.
In the absence of data, is it sensible to proceed however we choose, regardless of what the sensibilities of others might be? Isn't that just a wee bit arrogant?
Leaving aside that it's literally practically impossible to change the world,
But, we can act in a way that has tremendous influence on the world.
Of course we can; however, bombs aren't particularly convincing arguments. There are much more effective means. We more or less singlehandedly toppled a major empire without direct assault, for example. That's pretty damned impressive. The USSR went from possessing 11 time zones to being a second-world power in less than half a decade. And most of that was due to US pressure. None of it was due to military invasion of the Kremlin and subsequent elections brought about under the watchful eyes of US soldiers.
what right have we to force a democratic, nominally atheistic government on, say, Saudi Arabia, which is a theocracy (essentially) steeped in Islamic literalism? Would it be any different from, for instance, forcing the Amish to accept the Internet? (On an ethical level, I mean.)
How do we know what the average person in Saudi Arabia wants if they don't
get to voice their views.
Actually I'm pretty sure that many people in SA can voice their views. It's not as though SA is actively trying to prevent people leaving; but the influence of Islam in that nation is tremendous, which deeply colors the lives of the people living there. They're (reasonably) free to leave -- jut like Amish are free to leave -- but they don't. They're reasonably free to voice dissent -- but for the most part what we view as crazy and/or restrictive is sensible under a hardline interpretation of the Koran.
I think that there is very significant evidence that the Shiites and the Kurds favor representative government.
Ah, but they don't represent all of Iraq, and this again sidesteps the issue of the people who've been killed. They not only don't get a chance to vote; they weren't given the opportunity to choose life under Saddam or ... well, death, with the possibility of things being better for someone else. They've suffered total disenfranchisement.
Yes, we
ran the election, but we didn't force >75% of the people in those areas to
vote. The Sunnis appear to want to go back to the good old days when they
were in charge. How that plays out will be critical to the future of Iraq.
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how that proceeds.
Giving the people a chance to choose their government, and to throw the
rascals out a few years later if they don't like what they did doesn't seem
like forcing things on people.
We did not "give" them the chance. We *made* their government vanish and then put another system in place entirely. That is compulsion.
Here's another way of looking at it. Suppose someone comes along and burns down your house, then gives you a motor home. The rationale is that your immobile house was keeping you from being free. The motor home lets you roam wherever you want to go. Are you happy because you've had that freedom "given" to you?
Or maybe the person doesn't give you anything at all. He just asserts that your attachment to an immobile home and to your material goods is evidence that you really weren't free, even if you thought you were doing fairly well most of the time. Has this "gift" of freedom made you happy?
Or suppose Australia overthrew the US government and installed a system that uses national runoff elections and includes mandatory voting for everyone over the age of 18. Would it be appropriate to complain about that, do you think? Or would the Aussies be doing us a favor by removing our broken Electoral College system and compelling universal enfranchisement?
Or suppose some radical Islamist overthrew the US government and did away with most forms of popular entertainment in the name of freeing us from the clutches of Satan. By removing the blinders of temptation and sin from our midst, by compelling infidel Americans to hear the Recitation, why, the will of God -- submission to him by mankind -- would be furthered, and any who converted to the way of Submission would be eternally free, free in the best way possible, free from damnation.
As I said before, we do not have the right to impose our national will on anyone else, regardless of how eminently sensible we think it is. If we really believe in the idea of "liberty and justice for all", we must *never* lose sight of the fact that justice is a very flexible word -- as is liberty -- and we can't arrogate to ourselves sole proprietorship of the definition of either.
I'd guess that many countries in the
Mid-East would not have the church/state separation of the US. That's OK.
The only possible way we could be forcing things on a people is if we
insisted on minority rights.
I (obviously) disagree pretty completely with that view.
I guess one of the questions that is under debate is whether representative
government was just first developed in the West (in the US to be specific)
or if the desire for representative government is an artifact of Western
Civilization, with many other people preferring dictatorships, monarchies,
oligarchies, etc. I, as you could guess, would argue for the former.
Greece developed a democratic model, what, 2500+ years ago? TTBOMK they were the first thing approximating a nation to do so. If that qualifies as western, I'd be inclined to agree that democracy is a western invention, though not necessarily a side-effect of Western civ.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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