What precisely is wrong with your claimed right to trample on other nations' sovereignty, based upon your judgment? Well, let me get very specific:
1. No one has appointed or annointed either you or President Bush as the keeper of the honor of other Governments. The premise that no sovereign nation has the right to judge another is not based upon the idea that governments are not accountable, or that they are not duty bound to protect their own peoples. It is premised upon the concepts of independence, honor and responsibility.
2. I do not know about your personal analysis of particular Governments, but I do know--as the debate in my feature makes very clear--that President Bush does not even have a clear concept of what the function of a Government, any Government is. He uses conflicting senses of Freedom in his speech; and that hardly qualifies him as a judge of the rectitude of any nation.
3. Their are very few--probably none--Governments that perfectly relate to all their peoples. In the West today, human freedom is generally on the retreat. Even apart from the absurdity of adopting universal suffrage, without any other qualification--which appears to be what Mr. Bush is trying to sell in Asia--from the standpoint that it is absolutely stupid to appoint decision makers without any sense of their qualifications to make decisions; there is no Government with a heterogeneous population, and never has been, which perfectly protects all its subjects or citizens in their pursuit of happiness. Almost any decision made is going to impact someone negatively. And I am not referring to the enforcement of reasonable criminal laws; but to the enforcement of regulations of conduct that find temporary favor, etc..
4. It is arrogant, in the extreme, to think that your or my particular theories for how a society ought to operate, have universal applicability. Generally, the cultures of any people will definitely influence their forms of government; and the cultures of any people will reflect their nature and past experience.
The particular institutions of America--the fine, sound, institutions that the Founding Fathers gave us, which we are gradually losing to Leftwing politicians and overreaching Courts--reflect the population here in the last three decades of the 18th Century: A hearty settler stock, drawn here with a sense of adventure, bent upon acquiring land, and space; a stock selected from the general populations of the Mother countries, for their more independent spirit, greater self-reliance, etc..
I could go on. But it should be obvious that most of the world do not have those same priorities. And Americans who seek to instill systems devised to further those settler priorities among people with other priorities, have a terrible track record--even as any more objective observer would have predicted--in creating havoc across several contintents. (Dean Rusk was saying the same things that Bush is saying now--albeit a bit more precisely--in the 1960s, and ruined a number of nations in the process.)
It is not a benign mindset that keeps trying to justify such really contemptible experiments.
William Flax
Ohioan:It is not a benign mindset that keeps trying to justify such really contemptible experiments.