Ogre,
Don’t you think that until we purge our government of its theocratic trappings, we shouldn’t be allowed to institute a policy of intolerance towards theocracies? Because from where I’m standing, the current US government looks to have some serious theocratic influences.
Until that point, going after theocracies in the name of God sounds a little, I dunno, hypocritical, yeah?
Yes, butwho is renting the nuts? It seems to me that the U.S. screws things up so much that I don’t have a lot of faith in their ability to set things right. Think about Iran: they had a democracy, and we overthrew it and installed a monarch. The Iranians got so ticked at us that they overthrew our monarch and became virulently anti-American.
Now that they have a democracy again, gosh, we’d better overthrow it at any cost to prevent bad things from happening, right? It’s certainly better to overthrow their government than to risk them electing someone anti-American.
Check out the link, BTW- it has a pic of Rumsfeld apparently treating Mr. Thug with more respect than he has ever treated Powell.
You know, I’ve heard a lot of comments here about how Hussein was such a horrible, evil person that we absolutely had to get rid of him. Have any of you people denounced Reagan for supporting him?
Yeah.
You’ll get no argument from me about evicting religion from our government. It has no place there.
i meant compared to what he wanted.
I did not say were were Nazis. I did say we were doing the equivelent of invadeing Poland.
We are invading countries that have not attacked and do not present a direct threat to us. We are taking over their governments without a plan or timetable, and show no garentees that our occupation being a temporary situation. In fact, we are requiring that civilians turn in their weapons, a right that is constitutionally garunteed to us at home, under the assumption that it is a defense against tyranny. By all appearences we seem to want control of an entire region.
At home, we are loosing our freedoms. While this is nowhere near Nazi-like, it is worrysome. Investigations and police action that used to be subject to public scrutiny can now be completly in secret, where there is no way to tell if the constitution is being upheld. New catagories like “enemy combatant” allow us to detain people indefinatly with no accusation or trial- and we have no problem doing that to huge amounts of people includeing children.
We have not justified these acts, and we have acted with extreme restistance to the idea that these acts should have justification. We are acting outside of the approval of our allies and of civilization in general. We act with extreme resistance at the suggestion that we should take the opinion of our allies and the civilized world into account. We are threatening the stability of the world.
It’s happened before and it can happen again. We all know where the attitude of “Let’s just wait around, surely it can’t get that bad” can get us. Sixty years wasn’t all that long ago, and we can’t bank on humanity having learned all that much in the intervening years. A seemingly civilized place can go downhill pretty fast, and don’t think for a moment that we are somehow immune. It’s up to us to be alert and to recognize when our own government has gone out of control.
Serious Question: What can we do about it?
Personally? I have no clue. I am worried, but I have no way of knowing if things will go all to hell or if everything really will just work out fine. I don’t think you can ever know things until it turns out too late.
If I did know things were going to get bad, I’d pack up my bags and head to the most reasonably neutral country I could. I’d like to say I’d join resistance movements, but in all honesty at that point I bet I’d end up just looking out for myself. There are few ways to fight against a government gone completely crazy. Those ways are rarely peaceful, and require a lot of guts and a lot of lives. If things are really that bad, we will be long past the stage of protests downtown. I don’t know if I have the guts to fight against forces that strong.
But I’m not prepared to leave my country (which I think is a good one) just because the sky might be falling. My family and life is here, and I’m more likely to be wrong than right. Even when things get noticeably bad, people (includeing me) are going to want to stay in their country in hopes that the powers of good in their country will win out. I have faith in my country. I can only hope it isn’t misguided.
George Bush disagrees with you. Only Islam should be evicted form Governmnet. Christianity is A/OK.
Here’s the thing. If Iraq is free, then they can choose whatever form of government serves their needs. Why, they could choose a constitutional monarchy. If we can limit their choice to only what WE want, then they aren’t really free. They will rightly feel that they are under our thumbs and their resentment of it will grow. Hell, wouldn’t we resent the hell out of that?
Consent of the governed and all that.
At the risk of introducing actual knowledge here, let me intervene.
It’s also a wild fantasy about on par with the End of History blather of the very early 1990s.
Frankly, almost every government in the region is structurally “Western style” and that has not done much to promote ‘Western ideas’ in a sense positive to US policy or generate pro-Western feelings.
Lives getting better is not a forgone conclusion, the issues run rather deeper than “democratization” and all that, and US short term interests mitigate against pressuring for more freedom as in the short term that is likely to have disagreeable results. The quasi dictators and related elites are our amigos in the war on terror you know.
In general, it would be helpful for people, before opining, to have a somewhat clearer vision of reality.
People power usually works best when it does not seem to have been generated by outside factors, above all in countries with a history of outside manipulation. As in Iran and the late unpleasantness with the Shah and our good buddies, SAVAK. Well conceived diplomatic pressure, as well as carrots would be a good thing. Clumsy Pentagon driven posturing is not.
Doesn’t strike me as a false conclusion, for should you have been aware of Iran’s history you would know that there are rather severe tensions between “Persianness” and “Arabness” – also tied in with 12er Shiaism versus majority Sunnism in the Arab world. Add to this that pan-Arabism is a largely secular idea that includes Xians, and your turn of phrase is not only poorly chosen, it is a rather largely fundamentally mistaken usage.
That would be the correct phrase, as it is not a synonym with pan-Arabism, although given Shiite versus Sunni tensions, Iranian pretences to Pan Islamism have continually foundered.
Saddam’s appeals to religion are no more signs of “fundamentalism” than STalin’s similarly opportunistic war time appeals to religion and Great Russian pride were fundamentalism.
Let’s all try to get this in our heads: mere appeals to national and religious feeling does not “Fundamentalism” make. The word has a meaning, and it certainly did not cover Saddam, even when he was making opportunistic religious references to try to appeal to the masses.
And yes, Nazi Germany was a secular state. Your rant regarding dictatorship is fairly misplaced – secular simply means not religious, and both the Baath and Nazi parties by structure and fundamental core ideologies were not capable of making it otherwise. Same regarding the CP USSR, occasional appeals do not render the system other than it is.
[Hijack]
Raising hand
Oh! Oh! What was this “End of History blather”? Please?
[/Hijack]
I haven’t read hardly any of the replies, but I just heard about this on the TV in a brief snippit on NBC’s Early Today as I don’t have cable and the local news sucks. (of course I hear about it to see if a thread has been opened…)
Anyhow, I am shocked and scared beyond belief. First it was Iraq, then threatening Syria, North Korea enters into the mix now this.
I have to tell you folks, this administration scares the living shit out of me. I liked Little Bush’s father, even saw him speak at a Home Builder’s convention in Houston and he was a stand up guy. Little Bush though, I don’t know what to think, Iran now? When is this going to stop?
I realize that terrorism is a serious concern but fuck, there is a point where we need to mind our own fucking business and maintain safe borders and let the world play their own games.
Egads.
I’m in for $100. I will give two to one odds.
If the Presidental elections don’t go off as scheduled in 2004, I will donate $200 to the Democrats (or any group you choose). If they do, you donate $100 to the National Republican party.
Do we have a bet? The Republicans will put your money to good use.
Cite?
Regards,
Shodan
Vatican City isn’t in the Axis of Evil.
The whole pan-Islamic movement stems from an earlier era of Western imperialism in the area. It is/was a reaction to outside powers imposing their will upon the Muslims.
The same excuses people are using now for justifying American imperialism in the Middle East were used by the British and French when they split up the spoils after the break up of the Ottoman Empire. It was all about Arab liberation blah blah blah.
This whole thing seems like the remake of an old movie with different actors as the good guys
Perhaps I’m just too optimistic, but I don’t see it happening - my suspicion is that too much of the populace and Congress is too wary of being lied to again and on such a massive scale. The reserves of credibility that allowed the Iraq travesty to occur won’t be there again, and the reserves of knowledge of the brutality of Saddam that allowed the supporters to rationalize their support of the war anyway don’t exist in Iran’s case. But if that changes, I’ll be happy (well, not happy, angry) to join elucidator on the barricades.
“Muscular diplomacy”? Is that a euphemism for “Crashing ahead to avoid considering the possibility of being wrong”?
Wow. Best meltdown ever.
I hope even sven doesn’t mind, but I can only echo the statement:
This is the crux of the matter, that we are pursuing aggressive wars against countries that pose a questionable threat, and lying repeatedly about the supposed justifications for this policy. The Bush administration flat-out lied about the threat posed to the US by Iraq, and we rolled over and took it. I must now be extremely skeptical of any claims by the administration that Iran now poses a direct threat to the US. This is not because I think the Iranian government is made up of a bunch of big teddy bears, but because my own government has lied to me so egregiously.
That said, I disagree with some of the predictions being thrown around here; i.e. I doubt we’ll see an invasion of Iran within six months, simply because the troops now in Iraq and Afghanistan are rather tied up maintaining control in those countries and are likely to be so for some time to come. In particular, I cannot see a substantial reduction in the need for a miltiary presence in Iraq until self-rule is well under way, and that apparently is more than six months away. In any event, the mere presence of these troops on either side of Iran is likely to accomplish most of what the administration apparently wants out of that country, at least in the short term.
Re: the elections wager, I’ll throw in a C-note of my own that sez the next presidential election will take place and will have an outcome as planned. Note those words, “as planned”.
I believe this is a straw man. AFAIK nobody at all was accused of not loving their country just because they opposed launching an invasion of Iraq. Please support your accusation with a cite or example, or withdraw it.
It’s easy to make this accusation, but where’s the evidence? Given the timing, there’s a better argument that the pan-Islamic movement stems from a reduction in Western imperialism in the area. More likely, pan-Islamicism has internal causes, independent of what the West has done or not done.
Michael Ellis:
Here’s an analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s book, which sparked/epitomized the blather to which Collounsbury refers:
Disclaimer: I haven’t read over that link thoroughly, so I don’t know if the analysis is biased or otherwise wrongheaded. It looks good at a quick glance, however.
Nohting more engaging than december posing what is “more likely” in complete and utter ignorance.
Abstracting away from the criticism, the Pan Islamic movement that kicked off in the late 19th century (we might locate it earlier depending on how we define things) was very clearly a response to European colonial intrusion. The whole European armies coming in to establish protectorates and the like, you know. Might have read something about that once, eh december?
Now, you may have space to disagree with the implications of the comparison, but you’ve got no factual grounds to question the fact that the movement arose (or gathered strength from) very much in response to Europena colonialism.
Given the timing indeed.