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.
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?
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.
galanter wrote: It may take a hundred years or two...but since when was instant utopia a reasonable expectation?
galanter wrote: The world can become better for *everyone*...and in the past has....we just have to make it so.
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.
steve wrote:
Imposing democracy is impossible.
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.
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
YOUR LIFETIME SHARE OF DEMOCRACY:
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I agree with this completely.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.