128shot said:
I suggest you learn history. We have a dirty record of supporting dictators that overthrow democracys or keep them from happening...
Oh wait, you're not suppose to know that.
I assure you that ludahai knows his history.
An unfortunate side affect during the Cold War. The Cold War deformed American strategic thought and our applied values beyond recognition. From the amoral defender of Europe's rotten empires, we descended to an immoral propping up of every soulless dictator who preferred our payments to those offered by Moscow. We utterly rejected our professed values, consistently struggling against genuine national liberation movements because we saw the hand of Moscow wherever a poor man reached out for food or asked for dignity. At our worst in the Middle East, and in the interests of stability, we looked the other way while secret police tortured and shabby armies massacred their own people, from Saudi Arabia to Iran.
Mistakes were made and we were used and blamed by those that oppressed and tortured.
However, the Cold War is over and the last dinosaurs of that era who have been clinging onto their jobs with the best spirit of Tyrannosaurus Rex are leaving. It is no longer acceptable among the intelligencia world and the planners to maintain the "stability" of governments that have outlived their expiration dates. From our diplomatic personnel held hostage in Iran a generation ago, to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on the United States, we have suffered for our support of repressive, "stable" regimes that radicalized their own impoverished citizens. That "Old Europe" mentality of respecting "soveriegnty" despite any humanitarian attrocity within borders is also a thing of the past. We must shake this too.
The Cold War warped our thinking so badly that when the Soviet empire finally collapsed in 1991, we proclaimed a new world order while thoughtlessly doing our best to preserve the old one. Our diplomats and decisionmakers needed new thinking at least as badly as did the men in Moscow. Look at our track record since the Gulf War: It is a litany of predetermined failures that would be laughable were it not for the human suffering that resulted.
Our age--roughly the period from 1898 through the end of the 21st century--is an age of devolution, of breaking down, of the casting off of old forms of government and territorial organization in favor of the popular will. Certainly, the forces of reaction can look very strong--deceptively strong--and the temptation is always to back the devil you know (and who allows you to explore for oil on his territory). But make no mistake--in one essential respect, today's America is on the same side as the most repressive voices in the Islamic world and the hard, old men in Beijing: We are trying to freeze history in place. And it cannot be done. In our ill-considered pursuit of stability (a contradiction in terms), we have raised up devils, from terrorists to dictators, who will not be easily put down, but the progressive future demands that we no longer support stability of these monsters. Saddam fell to the collective shame of those that prefer militant despots to western inspired democracies and it fell to those liberals who prefer to continue in the traditions of "old Europe."
With Afghanistan and Iraq, we have strayed from the old course. While people are clinging onto controversey and any angle that might lend them some support to explain away their personal inadequecies, America, with little help from "Old Europe," has freed two nations of people who are unfortunately unable to sustain themselves without the opressions and abuses of their former regimes. Regimes, we at one time, ignored as they practiced their abuses behind "sovereign" borders and frequently exported their terror. Times are changing and some of our "allies" in the Middle East and Europe don't like it.
The irony in this is that our own American people who are complaining to no end about today's events use our Cold War past to cast shadows. How sad that they are too blind to really notice the changing times as they are witnessing the very thing they want America to stand for again.
