Cynical Nation

Honestly...I think this is one of the few places in the world where ANY change is likely to be better than the status quo.

Regardless of what I think of Hamas, the Palestinians respect and trust the organization. It is not outside of the realm of possibility that holding actual, day-to-day responsibility for Palestinian lives will be a sobering experience for Hamas.

And maybe this will finally give serious Palestinians enough self-confidence to deal with the facts on the ground as they actually exist rather than the way they hope things will pan out when the Jews all miraculously disappear.

Barry,
Eeverybody should have the right to vote. That does not mean that it is worth the lifes of Americans soldiers. You know what is the main party of the winning coalition of the elections in Iraq? Let me tell you. It is the "Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq". To me it is obvious that Iraq will degenerate to another Iran-like theocratic regime with time. I dont care if the Iraqis want that or not. It is a terrible idea, with or without elections, and certainly not worth the lifes of American soldiers.

Far more likely is Iraq's disintegration.

It was an artificial construct anyway.

It was created in 1922 after WW I by the British.

The Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites have little common ground.

America eradicated Saddam Hussein, the world's leading state sponsor of international terrorism and apparently felt the need to rebuild the country we fragged.

We really need to install a Shah-type government there. One that will allow American military bases, from which we could operate effectively throughout the Mid-East.

So JMK,
Thats your perception of democracy? Installing a Shah-type brutal regime? The Shah was as bad as Hussein. Look how it served us supporting him in the past.

Well, it's NOT "installing democracy" at all, BW.

And "installing democracies" or even "assisting those nations that don't have any possibility of furthering our own interests" has NEVER been America's foreign policy, though sometimes America's real motives must be "sugar-coated," in order to make them more palatable to more people.

The U.S. had now Professor Emeritus (University of Chicago) and Nobel Prize winning economist serving as Augusto Pinochet's Economics Czar through 1978, with Jimmy Carter in the WH. Now it's true that Carter was the ONLY American President to abandon U.S. interests, in favor of some nebulous "good global citizenship" and he was rewarded with economic disaster for that idiotic move. It was he who abandoned the Shah of Iran and later Pinochet, another loyal friend to the U.S. and a fervent anti-Communist.

If Carter had supported the Shah of Iran, ironically enough, the Ayatollah would never have come to power, the American hostages, taken from our Embassy in Tehran would never have been taken and if he'd have merely put our own global interets over everyone else's, the economy would not have suffered as much under him as it did.

Reagan, thankfully reversed that, by among other things supporting the Contra rebels in Nicaragua over the Soviet-backed Sandinistas, as well as the Afghani rebels who rebuffed the Soviet invasion and Saddam's Iraq versus the Soviet-backed Iran of the 80's.

Pre and Post-Carter, U.S. foreign policy has always been that even if Communism attempts a peaceful experiement in some remote part of the world, it violates America's Capitalistic interests and that experiment must be thwarted (undermined or eradicated).

The reason for that is that perhaps some form of Communism CAN exist on some remote Pacific Island where fruit falls from the trees and people can sleep under the stars on the beach, but its very existence might make others, in harsher climes, facing harsher realities think the same thing possible for them.

There's few things more dangerous than that to the underpinnings of this country.

America, like EVERY other nation, stands for its own interests FIRST & FOREMOST, all else is an afterthought.

Again, why do you think we didn't get involved in the internal struggles in Rwanda, where over 700,000 Tutsis were slaughtered in less than six months, while we did get involved in the Balkans where a few thousand Serbs and maybe 10,000 Albanian Muslims had been killed in ethnic infighting there?

Why do you think it's taken us so long to do anything with Dafur (in the Sudan), but are at the ready to jump in on any major Mid-East crisis?

Could it be that neither Rwanda, nor the Sudan have much that puts our major interests at stake?

Of course and this is rightly so!

You have to do a sort of global triage. Picking out those places you CAN intervene and those are almost always going to be those places where its "worth" intervening (to advance our own interests). Sometimes that assessing that some countries "aren't ready" for democracies and either installing or supporting governments that are virulently anti-Communist (won't nationalize our mines, wells and factories) and friendly to the U.S.

Same under LBJ, same under Nixon, same under Reagan and same under Clinton and now Bush Jr...and as "small minded" and "self-serving" as that might appear, it's also necessary, because that's the way things are and that's the world we live in.

I just felt that someone ought to highlight the fact that when JMK claims that Carter was responsible for the fall of the Shah of Iran that it's complete speculation.

It's not speculation that the Carter administration abandoned/"withdrew American support" for the Shah of Iran, GZ, and yes, THAT pretty much doomed that government which existed, largely due to American support, in exchange for their keeping more radical elements there at bay and from nationalizing/stealing American built oil wells, etc in that country.

I believe the Carter move away from "blatant Americanism" (support for America's business interests abroad no matter what the local/regional cost) was a disastrous one, especially in the midsts of the Cold War with world communism.

While it's true that pre-Carter American foreign policy often had us supporting a veritable rogue's gallery of foreign leaders, some of them tyrants, so long as they opposed Communism and made no overtures to nationalize/steal our rightful interests in those places, it's also true that that policy served our national interests, both foreign and domestic, very well from the close of WW II until his time in office.

People who criticize that today, tend to be, on the whole, woefully naive.

Reagan's return to the original policy and that administration's supporting the likes of Saddam versus the Soviet-backed Iranians, and the Contras against the Soviet backed Sandinistas (in Nicaragua) and the Afghan rebels against the Soviets, bled the Soviet Union dry.

It was, on the whole, a good strategy. It was good because ultimately, it worked!

Carter's strategy obviously did not work abroad and also slammed the economy here at home - double digit interest rates, double digit inflation and double digit unemployment. The Trifecta of STAGFLATION!

Some complained that the FIRE industried (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) helped to bring the Carter administration down by deliberately tanking some sectors of the economy (now, THAT'S speculation) and perhaps they did, but his policies were ruinous and gave him no way out when things got really bad.