The Importance of Democracy

[Redleg]

One of the notable things about Buchanan is that he doesn't understand that it is usually precisely the sort of tunnel vision, which sees only short-term political expediency, that has created the situations where he says it is necessary to cooperate with dictators, and which has generally come back to bite the US and others on the arse eventually.

All politicans see things in two aspects, short term gain and self interest for re-election. The rare exception is the politican that actually attempts to do something for the long term good without care for his/her own re-election. So to say its notable about Buchanan is a bit misleading since most if not all of US politians fall into the same catergory. Even the two front runners for the democrat party fall into this catergory just as McCain does.

A perfect example is the Arab autocrats whom he says have to be relied on- without decades of Western support for them and help from anti-communist crusades like the induced collapse of Afghanistan, where would Al Qaeda be now? Probably nowhere. But we have Al Qaeda and so now according to Buchanan we have to cooperate with whichever illegitimate despot will cooperate in killing them, even if being associated with such rulers guarantees that we will be fighting Al Qaeda forever.

So ignore short term de-stablizations because they might not have an impact. This seems also just as short sighted as your claim concerning Buchanan. This hindsight into the cold war is rather amusing to me. What did the world community do when the USSR decided to help its communist ally in Afganstan remain in power? Then one would have to review all of the human history of conflict to find out how many times allies have been made of less then savory nations to defeat a worse threat. A prime examble would be WW2 where the United States sent material aid to the USSR to help them survive and then beat Germany on the Eastern Front. Then there is the deals England made with Arabs during WW1 to break the Ottman Empire.

Same goes for Hezbollah and Hamas- did it ever occur to him to that part of the reason for the ultimate rise of these movements is that the US government didn't dissuade its ally from putting its proverbial foot in it by blundering into Lebanon, colonising the West Bank and destroying the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority?

Did it ever occur that when Israel was formed by the United Nations that such organizations would develop? These groups all form not from the incursion of Israel into Lebanon but because Israel exists. Lebanon justs adds fuel to the alreadly existing fire.

And the Persian Gulf- first support the Shah and then when he gets turfed out support Saddam Hussein, and when he stabs you in the back what then? Put an army in the Arabian peninsula, bomb the buggery out of Iraq and raise the ire of Islamic nutcases I guess.

Again a rather simplistic reviw of the history of the Persian Gulf. Its also rather simplistic in its nature given the complexity of the relationships between the nations of the Persian Gulf and their relationships with the United States and Europe. For instance most dont realize that the United States did not begin to activitly support Israel until a certain year. That the two primary nations that supported Israel were responsible for its development of nuclear weapons, not the United States. Then there is the relationship with Jordan that is often overlooked because it is about the best model of state relationships between the United States and a Middle Eastern nation.

Then lets look at why the relationship between Iran, Iraq, and the United States. What events happened that caused the conflict between these three nations?

If Buchanan had half a brain he would realise that stable democracies, even if they don't always let the US use their air space to bomb other countries or help with pointless conflicts in the third world, don't generally start wars or have such a lack of control over their territory that other can use it to start wars.

You would be surprised - Buchanan probably realized this since he was not talking about stable democracies and issues with them. There are a few stable democracies that dont always allow the US to use their air space and are treated still as friends.