galanter wrote:But I think it's a good thing for the US to *occasionally* make a sacrifice to liberate millions and millions of people. War is never pure. But history won't remember Haliburton's profits. History will remember our giving an ancient people the chance to face their demons and rejoin civilization.

Welcome back to civilization. Now more than ever, so fresh and demon-free!

galanter wrote:I'd say a timeline going back 1000 years. You don't see a trend in favor of democracy and human rights? Do you want to be an average person in the year 1000?

In sunny Middlesbrough maybe not. But in vast swathes of the world I would rather be an average person there in year 1000 than an average person there now.

And as an aside the behaviour of our governments toward the ecological trouble we face is as pertinent as Iraq, Chemists etc

Possibly more so.

galanter wrote:Seriously, you can't have it both ways. You can't advocate Taoist non-attachment one moment and then the next moment single out Bush (or whomever) as being significantly evil compared to others...

...But if you wanted to beat a hasty retreat out of the village I wouldn't fault you for it. Just keep in mind that when Lao Tzu did this he didn't pitch a tent outside the village gates and spend his time throwing rocks.

This is a fair do's criticism.
I just can't seem to help myself.
I think it's just hangover from all that social indoctrination I went through - as we all do.
Truth is I don't resent that (not yet anyway) I don't mind seeing one thing and feeling another. Or at least I can appreciate it as one of the contradictions of life. These contradictions make life rich.

man.

galanter wrote: It may take a hundred years or two...but since when was instant utopia a reasonable expectation?

any utopia is an unreasonable expectation.

galanter wrote: The world can become better for *everyone*...and in the past has....we just have to make it so.

okay, while you're at it dream a little dream for me too. If life was ever better for everyone why would anyone want to fuck it up?

galanter wrote: we are acting on the moral side of the line. And that's a hell of a lot better than what Saddam ever did.

you still don't seem to see it. WE helped Saddam and we continue to help other ruthless scum.

We are not on the moral side of any line except the one that says 'we are right by virtue of the fact that we are us and it doesn't matter what we do because we are right so nothing we do can be wrong'

You have decided upon a correct course of moral action (for others to take mind you, but with your support) but you refuse to see where you (or those acting on your behalf) transgress your correct course of moral action.

anyhoo, bedtime now.
Byeeee

steve wrote:
Imposing democracy is impossible.

Not saying we should do it, but I don't think it's impossible. It worked out in Japan, Germany, and the Phillipines.

I would change this statment to read "Imposing democracy is impossible...unless we're willing to send a shitload of troops."

galanter wrote: What is important is the way democracy allows constant improvement.

In the early years of the US blacks were property, only land owning males could vote, etc etc. Do you think the founders didn't see the irony in this? What was important was that they created a system that could evolve and improve over time...and indeed it did. A system like Saddam's offers no such hope. It is static and unchanging in its immorality.

So whatever the leadership's motivations (and my theory is they are mixed and not uniformly evil, although ultimately I can't know for sure) the effect is to open a door from Sadism to some form of democracy. Surely the future is not fascism but rather freedom. And unfortunately, it seems equally sure that there is no painless way to make the transition.

It's tragic that a corrosive relativism born of postmodern theory has been reified to the point where it seems more real than the obvious real-world physical suffering involved in this situation and others.

Arguably Saddam killed about 1 million of his own people in 25 years. By way of comparison if you add up every US casualty from every war from the revolution to present you get something like 650,000 fatalities. Put another way, in order for Bush to reach per capita equivalence to Saddam in terms of US casualties he would have to kill (300M * 1/25) 12 Million Americans.

Interesting:

-- the US imprisons a greater share of its population than any other nation on earth. More than Saddam's Iraq. More than China. More than anyone else.

U.S. incarceration rates by race, June 30, 2004:

* Whites: 393 per 100,000
* Latinos: 957 per 100,000
* Blacks: 2,531 per 100,000

* South Africa under apartheid (1993), Black males: 851 per 100,000
* U.S. under George Bush (2004), Black males: 4,919 per 100,000

Freedom reigneth from on high. And you like Cops, you say.

meanwhile: wealth is more likely to be transferred by inheritance in the US than in Canada and much of Europe.



The top 1% of households in the States hold 38% of your nation's wealth. The gap between the wealthiest and the lowest income families grew from 11 times to 19 times in the past 2 decades.

The US ranks 29th in the world on Infant Mortality.

Ah, the cradle of democracy. Nothing imposed there.



Graffit on a building near my house:

YOUR LIFETIME SHARE OF DEMOCRACY:

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

galanter wrote:The world can become better for *everyone*...and in the past has....we just have to make it so.

But we shouldn't have to feel guilty about accidents of birth. As long as we make sure this century is fairer than the last, and the next fairer than this one, we are acting on the moral side of the line. And that's a hell of a lot better than what Saddam ever did.

I agree with this completely.

However.

If we are to make things better, more just, more equal, we must take every step possible to ensure that our actions are truly in service of that. Progress towards an ideal is only possible if that ideal is truly being served, and, frankly, nothing of the sort is going on in our government today.

Bush and his fellows advocate war without end, force as diplomacy, nationalism as foreign policy. They want the government to have the power to detain indefinitely on suspicion, torture, and try suspects in courts without juries, without oversight, and without the possibility of justice. They want their power to be absolute and arbitrary. They support waste and self-destruction in the name of monetary gain, and cruelty, oppression, racism, xenophobia, and theocracy in the name of political power. They back tyrants to topple a tyrant. They consider science a threat, free flow of information a threat, privacy a threat, economic equality a threat, inalienable rights a threat, speech a threat, political opposition traitorous.

They are dragging us back into the dark ages kicking and screaming, and their incidental removal of Saddam is the lone bright spot in a venture that has proven to be incredibly destructive to the values you hold dear in every other respect.

Two steps forward. Six steps back.

steve wrote:About the only successful coup the US has ever engineered was the removal of Australia's Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1975. Hooray! We knocked-off the government of a prison island!

Imposing democracy is impossible. It happens when there are democrats willing to die to create it for themselves, and not before. In some circumstances (most third world people qualify), people would rather live as they are accustomed than suffer chaos in the hope of attaining a status that will mean little to them in practical terms.

Does a goat herder care who controls the money in the banks he will never visit, or who writes the laws that will never reach as far as his village, or if he may vote for a head of state who cares not a whit for him?

No, but he would like to keep the use of his arms, and would like his sons to live to adulthood. Creating war around him is not to his benefit in the slightest.

Steve, I suspect your objections are not purely pragmatic, but since your argument is that's what I'll address. (Even as I try to reduce my political posting. To think that I came by here to check up on the music scene!)

It's good to learn from history. I'm already on record as being against siding with tyrants who happen to be the enemies of our enemies. As I mentioned earlier it undermines one's moral authority, and is usually bad tactics in the long run anyway.

But history also teaches us that it's dangerous to over generalize. Each situation is unique, and "fighting the last war" is generally a bad idea.

Most of the examples you cite are cases where the US propped up a dictator or otherwise was self-serving to the exclusion of the interest of others. (Politics is always somewhat self-serving. But it's good to be helpful at the same time. Win/win and all that.)

In the specific case of Iraq we are not talking about a nation of goat herders. Iraq is also, relative to others in the region, a somewhat secular society. We are talking about a sophisticated technologically adept people who want to participate in the world, but have been oppressed by a despot.

I agree that democracy can't be imposed. It's almost a contradiction in terms. But that's not what is happening in Iraq. We didn't sponsor a coup. And we didn't install a puppet to run the country for us. (There were some not-so-great guys some of the Bush crowd tried to push forward, but it didn't work, and I say good for the Iraqi people for having their own mind, and good for us for ultimately respecting their democratic choices.)

We overtly removed him from power. And then a sort of bootstrapping process was started with the Iraqis themselves controlling more and more of their own country.

As I noted somewhere before at least some Iraqis tried to take down Saddam, but without outside help they simply couldn't overpower him...despite the fact that most in the country wanted him gone.

So are the Iraqis ready for democracy? The Iraqi elections were not perfect, but the level of participation is a measure of intent. From that, the best evidence for this question, I'd say the Iraqis are clearly ready for democracy. It is not being imposed. It is being embraced. The only questions remaining are tactical. How can the democratic majority overcome the violent insurgent minority, death squads, and so on?

galanter wrote:
I agree that democracy can't be imposed. It's almost a contradiction in terms. But that's not what is happening in Iraq. We didn't sponsor a coup. And we didn't install a puppet to run the country for us. (There were some not-so-great guys some of the Bush crowd tried to push forward, but it didn't work, and I say good for the Iraqi people for having their own mind, and good for us for ultimately respecting their democratic choices.)

We overtly removed him from power. And then a sort of bootstrapping process was started with the Iraqis themselves controlling more and more of their own country.

Hey Philip,

you are full of shit.

When Paul Bremer shredded Iraq’s Baathist constitution and replaced it with what The Economist greeted approvingly as “the wish list of foreign investors,” there was one small detail he failed to mention: It was all completely illegal. The CPA derived its legal authority from United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483, passed in May 2003, which recognized the United States and Britain as Iraq’s legitimate occupiers. It was this resolution that empowered Bremer to unilaterally make laws in Iraq. But the resolution also stated that the U.S. and Britain must “comply fully with their obligations under international law including in particular the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the Hague Regulations of 1907.” Both conventions were born as an attempt to curtail the unfortunate historical tendency among occupying powers to rewrite the rules so that they can economically strip the nations they control. With this in mind, the conventions stipulate that an occupier must abide by a country’s existing laws unless “absolutely prevented” from doing so. They also state that an occupier does not own the “public buildings, real estate, forests and agricultural assets” of the country it is occupying but is rather their “administrator” and custodian, keeping them secure until sovereignty is reestablished. This was the true threat to the Year Zero plan: since America didn’t own Iraq’s assets, it could not legally sell them, which meant that after the occupation ended, an Iraqi government could come to power and decide that it wanted to keep the state companies in public hands, or, as is the norm in the Gulf region, to bar foreign firms from owning 100 percent of national assets. If that happened, investments made under Bremer’s rules could be expropriated, leaving firms with no recourse because their investments had violated international law from the outset.

Both al-Abadi and Tofiq told me about a meeting—never reported in the press—that took place in late October 2003. At that gathering the twenty-five members of Iraq’s Governing Council as well as the twenty-five interim ministers decided unanimously that they would not participate in the privatization of Iraq’s state-owned companies or of its publicly owned infrastructure.

But Bremer didn’t give up. International law prohibits occupiers from selling state assets themselves, but it doesn’t say anything about the puppet governments they appoint. Originally, Bremer had pledged to hand over power to a directly elected Iraqi government, but in early November he went to Washington for a private meeting with President Bush and came back with a Plan B. On June 30 the occupation would officially end—but not really. It would be replaced by an appointed government, chosen by Washington. This government would not be bound by the international laws preventing occupiers from selling off state assets, but it would be bound by an “interim constitution,” a document that would protect Bremer’s investment and privatization laws.

At first, Plan B seemed to be right on track. Bremer persuaded the Iraqi Governing Council to agree to everything: the new timetable, the interim government, and the interim constitution. He even managed to slip into the constitution a completely overlooked clause, Article 26. It stated that for the duration of the interim government, “The laws, regulations, orders and directives issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority . . . shall remain in force” and could only be changed after general elections are held.

Bremer had found his legal loophole: There would be a window—seven months—when the occupation was officially over but before general elections were scheduled to take place. Within this window, the Hague and Geneva Conventions’ bans on privatization would no longer apply, but Bremer’s own laws, thanks to Article 26, would stand. During these seven months, foreign investors could come to Iraq and sign forty-year contracts to buy up Iraqi assets. If a future elected Iraqi government decided to change the rules, investors could sue for compensation.

But Bremer had a formidable opponent: Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, the most senior Shia cleric in Iraq. al Sistani tried to block Bremer’s plan at every turn, calling for immediate direct elections and for the constitution to be written after those elections, not before. Both demands, if met, would have closed Bremer’s privatization window. Then, on March 2, with the Shia members of the Governing Council refusing to sign the interim constitution, five bombs exploded in front of mosques in Karbala and Baghdad, killing close to 200 worshipers. General John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, warned that the country was on the verge of civil war. Frightened by this prospect, al Sistani backed down and the Shia politicians signed the interim constitution. It was a familiar story: the shock of a violent attack paved the way for more shock therapy.

Immediately after the nominal end of the war, Congress appropriated $2.5 billion for the reconstruction of Iraq, followed by an additional $18.4 billion in October. Yet as of July 2004, Iraq’s state-owned factories had been pointedly excluded from the reconstruction contracts. Instead, the billions have all gone to Western companies, with most of the materials for the reconstruction imported at great expense from abroad.

With unemployment as high as 67 percent, the imported products and foreign workers flooding across the borders have become a source of tremendous resentment in Iraq and yet another open tap fueling the insurgency. And Iraqis don’t have to look far for reminders of this injustice; it’s on display in the most ubiquitous symbol of the occupation: the blast wall. The ten-foot-high slabs of reinforced concrete are everywhere in Iraq, separating the protected—the people in upscale hotels, luxury homes, military bases, and, of course, the Green Zone—from the unprotected and exposed. If that wasn’t injury enough, all the blast walls are imported, from Kurdistan, Turkey, or even farther afield, this despite the fact that Iraq was once a major manufacturer of cement, and could easily be again. There are seventeen state-owned cement factories across the country, but most are idle or working at only half capacity. According to the Ministry of Industry, not one of these factories has received a single contract to help with the reconstruction, even though they could produce the walls and meet other needs for cement at a greatly reduced cost. The CPA pays up to $1,000 per imported blast wall; local manufacturers say they could make them for $100.

The Code is Almighty wrote:

steve wrote:
Imposing democracy is impossible.

Not saying we should do it, but I don't think it's impossible. It worked out in Japan, Germany, and the Phillipines.

Those were nations with which we were at war in the formal two-nations-fighting sense. There was no internecine conflict -- no simmering civil war -- waiting to unfurl. Nobody thought the situation in Iraq was more like Germany than Vietnam, more like Japan than Yugoslavia.

Phil

Your cui bono analysis is badly broken - you insist that the Iraqi population is the ultimate / eventual beneficiary of the destruction of their infrastructure, which is not surprising since all you can muster in important terms of description of pre-2003 Iraq is that it was "[not a country of] goat herders."

Faint praise. Iraq was a country of air conditioning, refrigeration, medical services, mass transportation, ancient cultural reserve, telecommunications, and most critically in terms of global security, a very secular social fabric. Indeed, that fabric was knit from bloody Stalinist-as-Ba'athist repression, but you have got to be smoking crack if you think that Iraqi citizens want lives of civil war / 100% misery against a, say, 10% chance of being snuffed out by their own gov't. And you have to be shooting drain cleaner to think that jihadists were happy with Iraq as it was before.

They sure do love it now!

This secular social fabric is probably forever lost with the colossally stupid move courtesy of Paul Wolfowitz et al, to disband the Iraqi army. Iraq was a Yugoslavia and the US has turned it into a post-Tito Yugoslavia. Hey, nice work! Wheelchairs for everybody!

The persons responsible in the US administration are (not beholden to, but are) a who's who of the defense-reconstruction industry. This is lost on you and that's truly a shame. "History won't remember Haliburton's profits?" More like you won't (can't?) admit their primacy.

George Orwell wasn't some charming storyteller. He was a fucking prophet. You really should read him again. He wrote while the Luftwaffe flew over his head and he mused about how the guys in those bombers were the same as he was and he understood why they were tyring to kill him. I have news for you: it wasn't because Germany lacked democracy.

If Orwell desn't do it for you, then how about just listening to the words of the giants who gave us this empire? Dwight Eisenhower wasn't some fucking pundit. When he warned what would happen when the defense industry and the military swapped spit, he was warning about this. Exactly this. Who better to know?

Phil!

Argh!

-r

steve wrote:

The Code is Almighty wrote:

steve wrote:
Imposing democracy is impossible.

Not saying we should do it, but I don't think it's impossible. It worked out in Japan, Germany, and the Phillipines.

Those were nations with which we were at war in the formal two-nations-fighting sense. There was no internecine conflict -- no simmering civil war -- waiting to unfurl. Nobody thought the situation in Iraq was more like Germany than Vietnam, more like Japan than Yugoslavia.

Good point. Iraq is indeed different. If the US were to pull out of there this year, I have no doubt that civil war would ensue...no question. The real question then is "why would civil war ensue?". The reason why is because Iraq has been so immersed in both petty ethnic disputes and more prominenty Islamic madness for so long....Judaeo-Christian morality has never really made roots there like it did in Europe or in the United States.

There will never be real equinamity in the Middle East as long as Islam is a major player. I am convinced of this.