Unbelievable but true. I guess that’s because Jeb is totally “his own man”! Let’s hope Jeb doesn’t also have Dick Cheney advising him on the best VP pick, because Dick has an unfortunate tendency to find the perfect candidate by looking in his magic mirror. Their campaign slogan could be, “Bush-Cheney: what could possibly go wrong?”
I don’t really want to get involved in this China vs. US thing as I have absolutely no love for China and the two nations are in such radically different stages of development that many comparisons are rather pointless, and Chinese transgressions against human rights, safety, and many other issues are well known. I have NO wish to defend China here. But I can’t help taking a bit of a devil’s advocate position here and pointing out that the issues are not as one-sided as you might wish they were – it’s far from a simple case of good guys vs. bad guys.
For instance I’m tempted to ask these questions that are pertinent to the subject of this thread: since the formation of the PRC in 1949, which nation – China or the US – has bombed or invaded other countries halfway around the world with no ethical or moral justification? Which nation – China or the US – had an organization called the Project for the New American Century founded by one Dick Cheney, which included at least half a dozen principals that were to become key members of the Bush administration – an organization whose primary purpose was to advocate global hegemony in which the US was to assert its military power to secure its interests all over the world? And which nation – China or the US – has long had an official policy condemning this type of global hegemony? Which nation, in short, could fairly be characterized as the more inclined to gratuitous warmongering?
On the subject of Tibet, China, as in the case of the Korean War, was responding to events on its own borders, and has had a long history with Tibet. And did it result in a Chinese version of Abu Graib or Guantanamo and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians dead? Actually it seemed to be more like this:
Tibetan prisoners of war were generally well treated. After confiscating their weapons, the PLA soldiers gave the prisoners lectures on socialism and a small amount of money, before allowing them to return to their homes. According to Tenzin Gyatso, the current as well as the Dalai Lama of the time, the PLA did not attack civilians.
[QUOTE=wolfpup]
For instance I’m tempted to ask these questions that are pertinent to the subject of this thread: since the formation of the PRC in 1949, which nation – China or the US – has bombed or invaded other countries halfway around the world with no ethical or moral justification?
[/QUOTE]
A totally contrived and subjective question. Which of the two countries has invaded another nation state, subjugated it’s people, killed hundreds of thousands (at least) of it’s citizens and imprisoned many times more and has done everything in it’s power to stamp out it’s culture, it’s language and it’s government? If you guessed China wrt Tibet then you’d be right in winning this other totally contrived and subjective question. China (and by China I mean the CCP) hasn’t done the things you are so obviously contriving to highlight the US because it can’t do them. What it HAS done is pretty horrific, however, and not just externally but internally to it’s own people.
Yeah, it’s worse. And those are Chinese excuses for it’s actions…long history with Tibet and ‘events on its own borders’ are the excuses it uses for it’s actions. And this isn’t a dead issue…unlike Abu Graib, which of course came out fully in the press and world wide, much of what China is STILL doing in Tibet is under wraps, with only fragments getting out…fragments that are generally washed away by massive Chinese propaganda that western media laps up and propagates.
At any rate, as you say, THIS thread isn’t about any of this, and China really has nothing to do with it. I would love for someone to start a thread on China to discuss why they get so much of a pass on this board as well as in the west in general, why more folks aren’t outraged by it’s actions internal and external, why it’s not given the same levels of scrutiny and censure the US is for it’s actions and myriad other things, but for now I’ll let folks get back to the actual subject of the thread which is would Iraq have been better off staying with Saddam. I’ve already given my thoughts on that subject, and it seems to me to bread down to folks who think Iraq would have stayed stable and in control under Saddam and those who think that the pot was ready to boil over and it was just a matter of time, with or without the US.
Well Marin Hyde’s posts are the best examples of arguing against instability as a result of the Arab Spring, but he excludes the no fly zone without specifying why he doesn’t believe it to be a factor. It’s possible that I missed it but I do not believe I did.
Other posts reflexively conclude a stable Iraq to today as though the Arab Spring had no pattern of successfully toppling dictators. I really just felt the need to reiterate my point with an example in that post because I was surprised at how unimportant many in this thread seem to think the Arab Spring was (coupled with a no fly zone in the case of Iraq). It’s as though many people believe the Arab Spring was not as monumental an event as it actually was.
More accurately without an avowedly secretarian government in Baghdad. The Shia/Sunni split did not occur until several years after the invasion, after the putting into place of powerful secretarian minded former exiles into influential positions, and backed up by the guns of the US Military. Without that, Shia-Sunni are quirks of belief rathern than mortal enemies;even today, more than a third of marriages are across secretarian lines.
Field Marshal Sisi was and is openly supported by the US and Saudi Arabia. Saddam would not have been.
Chances are he would have croaked by now and we would have a succession crises.
And turning to domestic politics, is there an ethnic group in China who’s members have a 33% expectation of imprisonment - what the hell would that say about any society?
Or, indeed, mass surveillance of the entire population on a scale the STASI could only dream?
