We were hit by Al-Quaeda, it’s true. But we’re also going after the financing and organizing of global terror - and it is a global issue, with radical muslim attacks from Africa to Singapore. We started with Afganistan, and as a practical matter we can’t go into Pakistan and will have to deal with it. Iraq, however, was a huge financier and supplier of terrorism ( a biz they msotly got into after Desert Storm), and one step toward shutting down global terror and starting some progress toward softening the eternal crisis in the MidEast. And it has worked, by-the-by. Democracy movements haven’t simply taken over, of course, but the issue has gotten stronger in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, and even the West Bank.
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Cite? The only credible “funding of terrorism” I’ve seen from Saddam was paying the widows of suicide bombers, which I believe the Saudis do also, and which you can certainly make an argument for. (Objecting to this seems kind of equivalent to supporting suing the bin Laden family.)
If we attacked every country with government support for terrorists by our definition, we’d be very busy.
Yes, the West Bank (and Gaza) had a democratic election, and of course we’re supporting the winner whole heartedly. :rolleyes: Bush’s last trip, and Condi’s ascendancy seems to show they are getting a bit more realistic. I haven’t seen a lot of people without strong political biases who think the ME is in much better shape than it was 7 years ago.
Iran was pretty repressive already, and became more so throughout the 1990s. Whatever elections were held there did not change the power of the mullahs, which hold ultimate control, as you do know.
Elections alone do not determine whether a country has democracy or representative government, and Iran has neither.
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No. The country did not become expressly more repressive threough the 1990s. The people keep exerting influence to move the government to a more open position, following which the theocrats shut down the process. However, even then, the theocrats have had to pretend to follow the rules by disestablishing political parties on trumped up charges rather than simply declaring masses of people to be outlaws. I do not share jayjay’s optimism that Iran would have thrown off the theocrats by now, but the time is coming when they will and making stupid statements branding the nation as an enemy of ciilization (and thus invoking the patriotism of the people to accept the theocrats’ rulings–much as the U.S. populace accepted the Patriot act), is the wrong action to take to produce the desired outcome.
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No. The country did not become expressly more repressive threough the 1990s. The people keep exerting influence to move the government to a more open position, following which the theocrats shut down the process. However, even then, the theocrats have had to pretend to follow the rules by disestablishing political parties on trumped up charges rather than simply declaring masses of people to be outlaws.
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Uh huh. Well, making things appear to be more legal doesn’t make anyone more free.
In any case, I refreshed my memory on Iran by consulting Freedom House, whose research in this area I typically find to be dead on. It shows that freedom in Iran, along with economic conditions, worsened considerably until 1997, when reformists of a stripe briefly won power. They fell victim to a crackdown in 2000, well before the current administration took power.
However much the regime might have become hardened by Bush administration policies since 2001, the fact remains that the fundamental nature of the regime hasn’t changed much since 1979.
You seem to be basing your assessment of the regime changes on this relatively brief change and on demographic trends. I hope for change there as well, but I’m not closing my eyes while I hold out the olive branch.