Democracy at Gunpoint

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/8364

Democracy at Gunpoint
by Jerome Doolittle | Jun 27 2007 - 8:09pm


snip//


During the last half century America’s foreign policy makers of both parties have demonstrated a near-total inability to identify and pursue our real self interests.

Time after time we embraced such self-inflated toads as Saddam Hussein, Noriega, Osama bin Laden, Batista, the Shah of Iran, the Greek colonels, Pinochet, Savimbi, Mobutu, the junta in Argentina, and the butchers of El Salvador. And time after time these creatures blow up in our hands, soiling us for generations to come.

It never occurs to patriots like “the C.I.A.’s own Al Haney” that for the suffering citizenry there is no real difference between a dictatorship of the right and one of the left. Thus the true self-interest of a confident, mature democracy lies not in choosing between two repulsive alternatives, but in rejecting both.

Rejection, though, ought not to mean war, whether open or secret. The resort to war would indeed — Haney was right about that — lead us into endless bloodbaths all over the world. And in fact it has.

And in fact it is doing so today, although only a fool would argue that Bush’s war actually grew out of a passion to set the world free. He may have convinced himself of that by now, but the rest of the world is not so credulous. Our childish belief that democracy and American hegemony are synonymous is not widely shared abroad.

Democracy is best spread by example and by commerce, both economic and intellectual. Our own preferred method — to beat another nation to the ground and ram democracy into it — is not an act of love. It is rape.