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Let there be no talk of ‘imposing’ ‘Western’ values here. As President Bush says, the values of liberty are universal, not Western. They only seem Western because the West has applied them most successfully, and grown rich on the proceeds.

Cool. I have been arguing a smiliar theory here recently...I call it Non-Invasive Democratization, and it consists of "imposing" upon nations the Bill of Rights, in essence, and then standing down to let people run their own countries. If natural rights come from the Creator, then they are equally the right of Iraqis, North Koreans, and every other people. These rights are being infringed upon in countries like Iraq with brutal dictators like Saddam.

Afghanistan thus far is an excellent example of Non-Invasive Democratization, we have installed a government of the Afghanis, by the Afghanis, and for the Afghanis, and as soon as AlQueda is purged and they are stable (and we have used Afghanistan as a base to take out Iran) we will leave.

I will paste my other posts on this principle, as reference...

IMHO, while we should not invade every tyranny on the globe, in such cases where there is an opportunity to protect national security AND remove a tyrant who represses people through barbaric violation of inalienable rights, we SHOULD remove him.

Afterwards, we should not "nation-build" except to the point where we leave the nation no worse than we found it. We should turn the government of that nation over to THE PEOPLE to institute whatever form of govenment seems most likely to secure their futre happiness.

If they blow it and install Islamfascism, so be it.

I think we have an opportunity here In the interests of our national security, I feel we have a real opportunity to bring, at least, due process and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment to Iraq, Iran, Syria, and North Korea.

Then step aside and let the people of those countires govern themselves as they see fit.

Africa’s problem today is not the after-effects of colonialism but another, more pernicious Western export: socialism, and its related grievance culture. Friedrich von Hayek, in his epochal The Constitution of Liberty (1960), regretted how the African elite of the independence years came to learn the ways of government at the LSE and Oxbridge, for they simply picked up the fashionable dogmas of the day. They took back to their countries not the ideas which had made Britain great — free trade and an open society — but those which were, even then, encompassing her decline: nationalisation and big government.

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