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Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla
Dealing with such obdurate blockheads is very frustrating. If you ain't gung ho, what are you but a dictator-lover? Anybody need to guess if I'm a dictator-lover?
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I've pretty much given up trying to guess what you are.
Howbeit, you seem to envision democracy as 'we pick a country, destroy the goverment, and tell the people they have been liberated'.
Forgetting Saudi Arabia, which is technically an ally until we can figure out a way to remove radiation from oil, there has never been a country invaded by anyone in the past hundred years that was not 'liberated' in the view of the people doing the invading.
Another issue is that some democracies are not representative. Iraq was technically a democracy, and life was good if you were a Baathist. The fact that the goverment did not actually represent the population was irrelevent to the goverment, which had rigged the system to stay in power. Single party goverments rarely pay attention to the needs of a large majority, just enough to stay in power.
Real change comes from within. Right now the Iraqis are struggling with their goverment, partly because change was imposed on them. It would probably have been better for the US to come in to clean up a civil war than to unilaterally invade the country. In effect we tried to peddle democracy like some kind of welfare program where people just sit and wait for the check to come in the mail. As a result, the cost in lives and money continues to grow.
Having someone like you show up with a gun to liberate me without being asked would probably be the worse of two evils. The net effect would probably be similar to how the children in the MOVE and Branch Davidian compounds were liberated by the BATF and police.
As for true democracy in Iraq, we will see how many US bases remain indefinitely after the troops pull out and what happens if the representative government sends us packing and cozys up to Iran. True freedom means the freedom to make choices other people think are bad for you (or them).