It would be interesting to hear Victor David Hanson
critic this article. Probably devastating!
"Balance of power, deterrence and punitive action have been abandoned in favor of a scheme to recast the political cultures of broad regions,"
Democracy establishes these features within the country. Otherwise what remains is strong arm politics. The politics of tyrants, like saddam and omar.
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Thanks
One reply to debate this piece would be to take it from the other end. What are the tendencies of brutally oppressive regimes?
Synopsis: If we view the present day Middle East as a race between Islamism and democracy, it doesn't even look like a close race. Islamism wins, solidifies and unites against the West.
The author is an idiot. If he considers Imperial Germany and Imperial Japan to have been democracies, then why not Saddam Hussein's Iraq? They did have elections didn't they and good old Saddam won unanimously. That's at least as democratic as Imperial Japan.
Not only does the U.S. expend a great deal of effort to usher politically impure states into a form of popular sovereignty that will not stop them from acting inimically to our interests, but in distancing itself from authoritarian states that are willing to work with us, it forgoes potentially critical advantages.
And this from the same folks who decried our dealing with
Latin American Dictators?
Why it's a catharsis!! A revelation!!
Now we are to deal with Brutes and thugs?
Funny that some would urge a Republican Administration
to do this!?
Baaaah.
Either we are the Guarrantors of the ideals we espouse,
and we spread those ideals or we are to sink into Islamic
tyranny.
Just because a youth crosses the border from Kuwait doesn't mean he is Kuwaiti. I think most Kuwaiti citizen youths are too busy counting their money to want to get killed in Iraq.
Helprin is a fantastic writer, his pieces in the Wall Street Journal have been great. Now, since he is writing something that questions the Bush Administration, the LA Times sees fit to publish his piece.
That's not what we're promoting, anyway. This article is a straw man.
Pres Bush knows better than that. Who knows what animates his subconscious, even he does not know that. The author might think he has some kind of Freudian insight into Bush's subconscious, but we now need to attain some insight into the author's subconscious. What motivates the author to make this claim? Bad shushi yesterday?
At the outset of WW II, neither Germany nor Japan were functioning democracies. The governments may have been democratically elected at one point, but they had clearly become functional dictatorships.
Moreover, he fails to note the evidence at hand. There are two (and two only) Muslim populations that might be described as "at peace" -- and in that state for close to a century.
One is Muslim population of Turkey -- democratic since 1920. The other is India.
In India, the Muslim population is huge (the 2nd largest in the world, after Indonesia) and fully participates in the country's democratic governance (the PM of India is a Muslim). It is Pakistanis and Bangladeshi who are committing the violence in India and Kashmir, not native Muslims.
True, neither of these populations is ethnic Arab -- but being Muslim doesn't necessarily predispose one against the practice of democracy.
Finally, I would ask Halperin this: "If, in your opinion, evangelizing for democratic regimes is unproductive, what is it that you propose instead to deal with the problem of radical Islamism? Should we simply kill them all and be done with it?"
LA Times just pining for Stalin.
I thought Austria=Hungary started WWI?
Bush is trying this expedient, because "realism" has not worked. It remains to be seen if sufficient freedom can be introduced in a society so inimiical to the basic tenants of capitalism, which since the middle ages has gonme hand in hand with political liberty.