Every successful Democracy today was created when the people of the nation in question rose up and fought for it themselves. Those uprisings have taken many different forms, from violent wars to peaceful, nonviolent protests, from slowly smoldering insurrections to flash bomb fast uprisings.
You cannot force democracy on people who are not willing to fight for it themselves. When you do, you get the mess we're in now. Without fighting for it themselves, the people do not learn what it takes to make a nation, what it means to be in a democracy, or create the economic and politic balances that are needed after the change takes place.
America has plenty of internal and external issues that it could be spending money and time fixing without keeping our forces in a country that doesn't want us there fighting for people who will not fight for themselves. Even if we are successful, the people will be reliant on our help for decades afterward because they will not have gone through the growing pains of a new democracy themselves and will not know what their individual roles are in that new nation.
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I don't know if you remember when your dad was in Kuwait, and later, when he had students from the area in his classes, but his one primary observation is that anything that was not done correctly was the fault of the equipment: taking personal responsibility was not a concept these men handled well.
ReplyDeleteWe are certainly seeing that now in Iraq: these people need a ruthless dictator to tell them what to do, when to do it, how to do it--and to accept responsibility when the plans fail, and to glorify in the notoriety when they are successful.
Iran's leader is such a man, a strong, ruthless dictator who is just waiting for the Americans to leave so he can step into the void and send these people on a world-wide killing rampage that will restore the honor to these countries and the people who live there.
Eventually, we will leave, when the laws of diminishing returns catches up with us and there is no other choice. The USA is not equipped to manage 2 global democracies as it's having problems with managing its own!
Sooner or later, the chickens come back to the coop to roost, and once they think they're safely tucked in for the night, the fox makes its way into the henhouse, steals all the eggs, and kills any chicken who challenges him.
Survival of the fittest may not mean survival of the US the way we think it does as we're the chickens, not the fox.