The problem is the governments of the countries that either allow people like Saddam to get into power, allow religions to dictate policy, or house terrorists. In other words, the opposite of our Constitution.
Can you remember a US President the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot?
One at a time, starting with Afghansistan....we need to put a few checks & balances in their governments.
FDR and Clinton might have come close had they been entrusted with the same power.
Yes. Perhaps we could put the same checks and balances that were put into the German Constitution after WW I. The German King (Kaiser) fled Germany at the end of WW I and the Wiemar Republic was formed as the German Government. It was called the Wiemar Republic because it was a republic similar to ours. The German constitution was written in the city of Wiemar. It was a Republican form of government with all the checks and balances to prevent any portion of government from attaining the power once held by the King. Hitler used the stalemate created by the checks and balances to come to power in 1933.
Hitler used the checks and balances as an excuse for the depression. He said was 1930's depression was caused by the form of government defined in the German Constitution. He said its freedoms allowed rich Jews to keep the people unemployed. Unemployment was high enough that the people bought it. They made him Fuhrer and let him kill 6 million Jews.
The German People over threw a Republican form of government to put in a dictatorship. The constitution that was done in Weimar to make a great nation in the wake of WWI was worthless when the people wanted it gone. All it took was bad times. By 1938 the German-American Bund was an organization with a large membership in the USA. It advocated teh overthrow of our constitution and the selection of an Amercian Fuhrer. It had a nation wide weekly broadcast originating in Detroit that was listened to by millions. It had as big an audience as Rush.
In all nations the people in fact rule. NO NATION can exist with out the consent of the governed. The Russian Czar's Kingdom fell to Lenin and Communism. All the power of a king could not prevent a communist government when the people wanted it. And all the power of the Soviet Union could not pervent the people from toppling it when they wanted the Soviet Union gone a decade ago.
Goverments and people who want to run governments tell you that constitutions rule. They do not. People ... ordinary people choose the government. We can not understand why an educated people would want a Hitler over a constitutional republic.. but they did.
People try to tell us our government is a piece of paper. As long as our people support what is in our Constitution it will prevail. When the don't it will not prevail.
No, but I can name a former attornexy general and a junior senator that come pretty close!
Clinton(s)?
One at a time, starting with Afghansistan....we need to put a few checks & balances in their governments.
During the writing of the U.S. Constitution, the Founding Fathers were influenced by the writings of Polybius who had described the system of checks and balances in the Roman Republican Constitution. They saw the wisdom of the Roman Republican system and incorporated a system of checks and balances into our own U.S. Constitution.
Polybius, by proxy, was therefore one of our American Founding Fathers in regards to the system of checks and balances.
Polybius and the Founding Fathers: the separation of powers
However, a recurring theme of Polybius' writings, which were a History of Rome written for the benefit of his fellow Greeks, was the theme of the noble and honest character of the Roman Republican citizen during the time in which he wrote. Polybius' time was the era of Rome's Finest Hour, it's life and death struggle with Carthage.
Without that noble character, without that sense of duty to the Republic, without the respect of the rule of law, the citizens of any nation only have a worthless piece of paper for a Constitution. Once the Romans lost that character, they lost their noble Republic regardless of the fact that their Constitution was such a fine document that the Untited States of America chose to found it's own Nation under it's principles 2,000 years later.
I am afraid that no one can put a functioning system of checks and balances into a foreign nation. That is something that only the people can do for themselves. If they have a noble character, they will flourish. If they do not, mere words on a piece of paper will have no effect whatsoever.
WJC?
You do that by breaking areas such as Afghanistan back up into their original tribal regions. Such people are very capable leaders at the local/tribal level, but wholly out of their depth for any sort of national, centralized government.
Scrap their current centralized government (ie., Taliban) and remind each tribe that if they try to expand their post-Talban tribal borders, that the U.S. and/or the UN will come back in and smash them. This keeps future conflicts much smaller and much more manageable.
It also plays to their strengths. Afghan tribes have survived for millenia. They know how to govern themselves at that level, so let's help them return to that state again. There are 12+ distinct ethnic groups in Afghanistan, all with historical tribal lands. Most people in their tribes never leave those lands in their entire lives, anyway.
For ambassadors to other foreign nations, let the tribes rotate amongst themselves for the various talent to be exported over time.
Yeah. His/her name was Klinton!
Wait, you mean Bush ISN'T Hitler. Dern, how did I get that impression? We know that the Democrats would never lie about something like that.