Looking at the looting of hospitals in Baghdad brings the following visions into mind:
1- Fidel Castro sending the hard core Cuban prisoners and asylum inmates on a boat to Miami
2- Los Angeles riots. Just take the police out of LA and see what happens
3- Didn’t Pentagon computers simulate the aftermath of Baghdad’s fall prior to the invasion? If not, why not? If yes, what was the plan to stop the anarchy?
4- The number of thugs with cowboy mentality in the US
5- The everyday life of nice, educated Iraqis living in and around Baghdad, compared to a month ago. Can that happen to the US suburbia?
6- Why over 50% of Americans do not vote? And among the other 50%, how many realize that this is a Single Party country: The Capitalist Party. Democrats and Republicans being two wings of the same party. Is this a Bush/Ashcroft junta Police/National Security State?
7- How many of the 70% pro war people are aware of PNAC and the foreign policy plan behind the invasion of Iraq? Is Bush’s gang a puppet government?
I suppose the subject of this debate is: Does the US need to be liberated? Or at least have a second political party?
I read the post and i understand what was said. “Contentless” implies that you didnt understand what was said, let alone the fact that you didnt offer any argument. The point being made here is that many are ruled by the few… thats just not the definition of democracy. We dont live in a “democracy”-- that is a misnomer. #6 in the OP is what interests me…
Half of the people dont vote
Out of the other half, id say only 10% really realize who the canadite actually is and what he believes in. Besides that we rarely get more than 2 canidate choices… its usually same ol’ guy #1 or same ol" guy #2, thats not much of a choice IMO.
Canidates are very decieving, after all they do what they gotta to win the election. It takes real research to find out who a canidate is and what they stand for, most of us are limited to the spinning out of control media views. How far did you voters go to research your choice before casting your vote? For most people, the answer is not very far.
Back to the origional question, Im betting that the American people are ready for a true democracy, but i dont think the politicians are ready to give up the power that they hold, and in the end the government has that final say. They will tell us that we are not ready for true democracy.
If there is anyone who can construct a real working democracy, it is the Americans. If we dont do it who will?
Hey, wait a minute. This page claims there are at least fifty registered political parties in the US, not just one. Don’t any of these do it for you at all?
Oh, well, tell you what. Come up with a snappy name and some sort of platform, then get back to us.
(There, folks, that oughta keep him busy for a while…)
I’ll say this - the US will have more than two effective parties, as soon as another group manages to appeal to the mainstream as well as the Republicans and Democrats do. The Republicans already do pretty much what mainstream right-leaning citizens want, and the Democrats do pretty much what mainstream left-leaning citizens want.
The “mainstream” media (that is CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, FOX and talk radios) tell us that we went to Iraq to change the regime and bring freedom and democracy to the Iraqis. And now, we have liberated the Iraqis, although the hospitals and museums are being looted as we speak. BTW, Saddam is/was 65 years old and would have soon died from old age. If the Iraqi people did not want his son to take over after dad’s death, they would pour in the streets and change the regime by themselves.
Yes. we are all glad to see the despicable Saddam vanish, but at what price? Wouldn’t it have been better to see the Iraqi people remove him by themselves.
Question is: Is the US qualified to bring democracy to any country, let alone that the US has violated the international law by invading another country.
Do you know why European countries have not single handedly invaded other countries since World War II? It is because they have learned through their long history of imperialism that you do not invade a country to topple regimes, to liberate the people from their dictatorship nor to install democracy. Yes. The UN voted unanimously for 1441 to disarm Iraq from WMD. However, it did not vote to remove Saddam by invasion.
The OP then goes on to say that if we are so good at installing democracy, why don’t we try it at home first. We have a lot of big problems here, least of which is the lack of medical care/insurance, decent paying jobs, affordable housing and a livable pension for our aging population. When and how are we going to liberate ourselves from this mess? Meanwhile, what are we doing in Iraq?
There is nothing to prevent a third party from emerging, provided there is enough interest in the electorate. Perot got quite a large % of votes.
Lots of people don’t vote. So what? Most of them just aren’t vested in the outcome. This is one of the stablest coutries in history, and many people see gov’t as more or less irrelevent in their day-to-day lives. I think that’s good. I’d like to see more people vote, but the fact that many don’t isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Calling the US a “non-democtratic” country is just more of the anti-Americanist jigoism that one hears all the time. If you don’t like the US involvement in Iraq, argue that fact on face value.
There is a sizable portion of punditry and comment around about how the Democrats are drifting further and further right. It is my belief that having two parties limits choice, because if the split is not “left” or “right”, but “right” and “further right,” the only choice to avoid “throwing your vote away” is the right wing party. Either that or stay away from the polls altogether.
Luckily for us, the UK has managed to produce a Third Party that’s centre left, just before the Left wing party gained power and then took a massive leap to the right, alienating many of its core in the process. For some reason, this hasn’t happened in America, which is worrying.
If the Democrats are drifting “right”, perhaps they are finding that a “leftish” product doesn’t sell well in the US. Left-of-center presidential candidates have been a disaster for the party (eg, McGovern, Dukakis). Of course there are plenty of people who argue that the American voter is just not eductated enough to vote for the correct, leftish candidate. These people tend to be of the leftish variety themselves.
I’d agree with you that, from a certain perspective, having a populace that did not need to worry about the government enough to vote would be a good thing. You find that voter apathy is generally high in countries without serious problems for the majority of the populace, and high in countries where people feel a need to see a real change.
Certainly, within the USA there isn’t exactly much to worry about. However, on the global stage, the situation is much more fractious and unstable than it is within a democratic nation. Global politics requires exceptional men at the helm, and they cannot always be relied upon to be in office when they are needed to be. Chirac, Schroeder, Bush, Perez et al’s big problem is that they are mediocre politicians, something national politics can cope with fine, but which can have disastrous consequences worldwide, as the current Complete Balls Up has shown. IMO, there are two “exceptional” leaders around at the moment, Blair and Berlusconi, and I disagree with their policies most strongly. Raffarin had potential, but is, unfortunately, always obscured by Chirac, who believes he is a better statesman than he is.
If you have a populace, such as you have in the US and England, who does not really care about politics, you produce a mediocre government. There is much to be said for mediocrity in politics - it’s what democracy is designed to achieve, one might say, but in a situation where exceptional leadership is required, it will not do.
Well, the US has always been further to the right than the rest of the world, and has always had quite an isolationist streak in the population.
Look at it from the point of view of the rest of the world. The last, what, four elections, the “leftish” candidate has been decidedly right-of-centre. One, this reduces the effectiveness of a party to actually run as an opposition, as we are seeing with the Democrat’s recent troubled period of “What’s our platform again?” nonsense (the Conservatives are having the exact same problem in England, because Labout basically turned into Tory Lite in a really rather skillful political coup). Two, it has knock on effects on the rest of us as our politicians either suck up to your president, or try their best to distance themselves from him.
The fact that your politics is steadily drifting towards the right, from my point of view as an outsider, is partially down to this general apathy and isolationism, where rather too many Americans don’t really care enough about the rest of the world to worry what their government does outside, as long as it looks like it’s doing a good job.
Part of the problem is that the cultural doppler shift caused by crossing the pond means that your politicians look worse than you think they are. You all look blue to us, and we all look red to you. This results in a breakdown of communications as people just talk right past each other, thinking they are understood, but missing out a number of bits of key cultural information which, when you get them, make you go “ohhh, now I understand.” The net result is, a large proportion of the American population thinks that American foreign policy “looks good,” to the extent that it figures in their thoughts at all. However, the people in the “foreign lands” who are actually affected by this think it looks bad. Part of this is down to the same cultural misinterpretations (which then get magnified back in the response), and part of it is down to the fact that the US is just about reaching the equivalent of 19th Century England in terms of its political ideas. Ideas which sound new and innovative and forward thinking in America have a distinctive ring of “tried it, didn’t work” in Europe.
I’m not going to argue “too stupid,” just that your priorities are different from what I, someone who is definitely affected more by your foreign policy than you are, would like them to be. I can’t vote for your president, but he has a degree of power over my country that exceeds the power my country has over yours. As such, my vested interests and concerns with your political system cannot be voiced, even though they exist.
Oh, please! What would you do differently? The war ain’t even over and you want soldiers to play cops? Of course there’s going to be some down time between when the old regime is beaten and when a new civil service can be put in place. British military engineers were laying water pipelines from Quwait (sp?) to whatever-the-hell-city-whose-name-I-can’t-recall-off-hand under fire. Can you name a war in history where an invading army went to such lengths to provide for the civilian population?
I opposed the war and the fact that it seems to be going quite well doesn’t make the decision to undertake wise. But that doesn’t mean that the US is acting inhumanely or irresponsibly. If you can demonstrate that a better plan exists to fight against a tough and often committed foe, while at the same time providing social services to the civilian population, then give it to us.
And in what possible universe is a few days, or even a few weeks, hell! even a few months, of general disorder and looting a greater cost than years or decades of brutal, spirit-breaking oppression?!
