Warsaw Station: The Downside of Democracy

President Bush says he is committed to democratizing the region, yet he also wants governments to emerge that are friendly to the U.S., benevolent to their own people, secular, capitalist and willing to stand up and fight against anti-American radicals.

But what if democratic elections do not produce such governments? What if the newly elected regimes are friendly to states and groups that Washington considers enemies? What if the spread of democracy through the region empowers elements that don't share American values and goals?

Then we're screwed. Under such circumstances the new majority Republican everything will undoubtedly be screaming for more wars against these newly democratized states. But this time, we won't have a good excuse like "Their leader is a bad man", or "We're liberating them."

What will we do when these new democracies start deciding that they don't want to sell us any oil?

7 Comments:

: As long as we've been expending these lives and this treasure converting these dictatorships and theocracies into happy democracies, we've been lead to believe that we're creating nations friendly to our cause.

This is highly questionable, to say the least.

What then, have we been doing?

Haven't we been charged too high a price to create something that has a darn good chance of giving us the same headaches we had before?; 2/25/2005 01:30:00 AM
: Thanks for the cross-posting Gus.

Man, we are in total agreement here. We don't owe them freedom, prosperity, and Democracy, we owe them a continuously exponentially increasing ass-kicking until they stop attacking us, using methods that have historically garnered their attention. Genghis Khan understood these peoples psyche much clearer than we can allow ourselves to admit. He knew that more than one enemy survivor per city meant that he would always have to watch his back.

I have always been sitting on the fence over our methods of waging this war. We are trying to wage it without hurting our enemy's support base, the minds of the world that subscribe to reformation of the Islamic Caliphate. I we are trying win it without using our advantages in billion dollar weapons systems that we are too scared to pull the trigger on. We might as well have been stockpiling stones since WWII, if we are going to force our soldiers to fight with the same weapons our enemy has. B-52s could have cleared out Fallajah without any us casualties. Asking our soldiers to take the Najaf cemetery twice because it wouldn't look good on election cycle TV if kept going to the mosque / firebase.

A nuclear armed Islamic Democracy just scares the shit out of me. Thats why we allowed ourselves to allow Pakistan to go nuke. Our self-defeating rulebook mandates that you cant wage war against another Democracy, and Turkey is a democracy but their every action is designed to foil us in favor of their Islamic brothers.

We have gotten used to convincing ourselves that all the people in the world share our yearning for freedom and peaceful co-existence, and we cant wage war against them until we put an evil face on their leaders, and pretend that they are being forced by their leaders to attack us. But the war against western culture is not being waged by any ME government....its the people. And allowing these people to choose the leader of their choice almost certainly means they will share their constituents hatred of us.

Our conscious wont allow us to point the finger at and name our real enemy the Islamic clergy and their brainwashed citizen soldiers. The Geneva convection was never designed for this holy war of extermination.; 2/25/2005 03:49:00 AM
: Great RT. Perhaps then you're ready to admit that, contrary to what Bush has been telling us, democratizing the Middle East was not the cure-all for our securtity woes. Wouldn't you then agree that this bloody war and occupation hasn't been worth it? That if democratization was the ultimate goal, that we could have done so without losing thousands of troops and civilians? That democratization was not so vital to our security that we couldn't have taken ten years along the diplomatic route instead of a bloody (and by no means necessarily faster) occupation?; 2/25/2005 12:02:00 PM
: Yeah its all a bunch of political BS.

I just want to kill as many of them as we can, and Bush gives me a better chance of doing that than a spineless Dem would.

Bush is far from the perfect commander in chief in my book, just better than any alternative we have.; 2/25/2005 04:29:00 PM
: This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.; 2/25/2005 07:18:00 PM
: Hey Gus, thems some nice ads displayed in your left content.

From your left content:

Official RNC Site - Support the GOP
You can work with President Bush and a Republican Congress to fully enact their compassionate conservative agenda. Learn.
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Thats funny. How much are you getting paid to allow conservative propaganda to be displayed on your personal blog.; 2/25/2005 07:19:00 PM
: Just one more reason to get rid of Blogsnob. I highly doubt it's incresing my traffic, and I don't like the idea of ads on my page. It used to be only blogs advertised -- a reciprocal kind of thing -- but they've gone commercial.

Yep. Perhaps it's time to let them go...; 2/28/2005 06:05:00 PM