The Importance of Democracy

[Furious Mental]

"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"

Worse threat? Ha! The USSR was bound to collapse anyway, yet the mujahideen were funded so as to provoke an invasion and initiate a chain of events which has left the country in ruins. But more to the point, they continued to be funded even after the withdrawal of Soviet forces had become inevitable and the Cold War was clearly coming to an end, simply to precipitate a speedy collapse of the Afghan government and send the remaining Soviet advisors out clinging to their helicopters in a final humiliation. This was in spite of the fact that it was obvious that far from installing any sort of stable government (never mind democracy) in its place, they would be at each other's throats and still fighting, and that the country and the border of Pakistan had been turned into a hotbed of a brand of extremism that saw the West and the USSR in much the same light. This is not hindsight- it was blatantly obvious at the time.

"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."

No. Only the PLO and PFLP go back that far. The current crop of terrorists, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad exist because of events for which Israel bears substantial responsibility and which your government did nothing to dissuade it from, notably the colonisation of the West Bank and its acknowledged use of collective punishment in military operations. David Ben Gurion said in 1967 that it would doom his country to perpetual war, and it has. It has guaranteed that negotiations always break down and by continuing it up until the present day the Israeli government has made the now moderate PLO look weak, ineffective and useless.

Your claim in relation to Hezbollah is still more obviously wrong- it was not created before the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Without that invasion it would not exist. Recent poorly executed and indiscriminate military operations (aided and abetted by your government) have helped cement its hold on southern Lebanon.

Is Israel solely responsible for all this? Obviously not, but it was all foreseeable and foreseen and should have been avoided by any country that counts itself as a sensible democracy, and probably would have been avoided if it had ever received sensible counsel from its biggest ally. The situation there is a failure of, amongst other things, the foreign policy of both countries.

"Again a rather simplistic reviw of the history of the Persian Gulf."

Not simplistic at all. The Shah of Iran was an unpopular dictator who was obviously going to meet his end eventually. Saddam Hussein was well known to be a murderous tyrant with expansionist aspirations, and yet he received foreign aid right up until the invasion of Kuwait. His final arms spending spree for that conflict was made with a line of credit extended by your government. I can hardly think of a better example of diastrous short termism. At least the collosal Snafu that is Afghanistan took a few years or so to gestate into a haven of anti-Western terrorism.

"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."

The point of Buchanan's article is that a democracy that doesn't help the US government (and he largely seems to count help as meaning help in bombing people) is less use and less worthy as an ally than a dictatorship that does, in other words anyone that gets in the way of carpet bombing isn't a friend. More generally he is saying the US government should simply seek out malleable dictators rather than cultivate relations with single-minded democracies, even though the US has scarcely had one dictatorial ally that didn't eventually turn on it or get overthrown.