Gautam wrote:
> Dictators that are hospitable to American
> companies are usually hospitable to Americans, in general.
>
Like, say, Pinochet? Or is _Missing_ a fictional movie?
Me:
Well, Pinochet was on our side during the Cold War. I'm not saying their
record was _perfect_, I'm saying it was better than the alternative. That
is the only standard with any relevance, because that's how the world
works. We can have one or the other. We can't wave a magic wand and have
liberal democracies spring up in places without the cultural background for
them. The world doesn't work that way, and not even the United States has
the power to make it happen.
> I'm sorry - the Turkish government has used nuclear,
> chemical, or biological weapons against the Kurds?
> I'd like a cite on that, please.
>
I don�t know, I am quite sure they didn�t use
biological or nuclear weapons, and I guess they
didn�t use chemical either, but there is a genocide
going on, and I don�t think someone whose family
is killed by TNT will be less sorry than someone whose
family is nuked.
Me:
But it matters a great deal. The Kurdish genocide is one of the great
tragedies of the 20th century. It's also kind of over. Although the
Turkish treatment of Kurds is a huge problem, very severe, a massive
violation of human rights, and so on, it no longer reaches the point of
genocide, from what I can tell. For that matter, one of the best ways to
solve that problem is to topple Saddam's government and partition Iraq,
with the northern third becoming a Kurdish state. But the tools and
tactics of the Kurdish genocide will not allow anyone to kill, say, 100,000
New Yorkers. Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical weapons do. That makes
them very different from other ways of killing large numbers of people, and
this is why it - legitimately - effects our policy. Our first priority is,
and should be, making certain that weapons of mass destruction cannot be
used _against us_. I'm totally comfortable with that statement. I will
_try_ and make sure that they aren't used against anybody, but I will do
virtually anything to make sure that they're not used against us.
>
> What I don't understand is why you feel that our tactics
> should be invariant with respect to circumstance.
> Egypt is different from Iraq. Why shouldn't we act
> differently with regards to Iraq than we do to Egypt?
> That's not immoral or hypocritical - it just make sense.
>
That�s ok, but isn�t exactly this what the USSR did?
Or the Roman Empire?
I am objecting to the assertion that the USA is a pure
force of Good, when the USA is just removing enemies
and replacing them with allies.
There�s no New World Order being created, but just the
Old World Order with another Empire that wants to
increase its influence over the world.
Me:
The USA is removing enemies and replacing them with allies. But our allies
are _better_ for the people they govern than the enemies we are replacing.
Are you describing that as morally neutral? It's, to put it mildly, a hell
of a lot better than anyone else in history. The USSR ran Eastern Europe
for its own benefit. The Roman Empire ran _all_ of Europe and large
portions of Africa for its own benefit. Butchering the population of those
areas was something done as a matter of routine. I have a fair number of
friends in the Army, I think they would have told me if they had been
shooting European civilians on a daily basis. Are we setting up police
states? Overthrowing free governments? Conducting genocide? Massacring
intellectuals? Suppressing the press? Hell, Alberto, if we acted like our
predecessors - you'd be dead. Because the USSR, if not checked by the
United States, and criticizied as you criticize the US, would have killed
you. Which makes us a little different from them, perhaps. As I've said
earlier the yardstick isn't perfection, because that doesn't exist. This
is the real world, a world that has evil people in it who seek their own
power and are willing to kill casually in order to get it. We do the best
we can. That has, on the whole, been a pretty damn good best.
I reject entirely the argument that we act in our own interest, and other
people act in their own interest, so we're the same. Not all interests are
the same, and not all ways of acting in your own interest are the same.
Unless you are suggesting that the Brazilian government should discard its
own interests and the protection of its own citizens when formulating
policy, I suggest you choose a different yardstick. _Of course_ we
influence governments to act in our favor. Should we influence them to act
against us? Obviously not. Well, we limit what we do in our own interest
and try to act on behalf of the populations of countries that have set
themselves against us, not just our own. Even more significantly, those
countries that are allied with us are usually good to their domestic
populations, while those that oppose us are not. Birds of a feather flock
together, as they say.
> And by doing so, they help their own countries profit as
> well. The experience of South Korea, China, and India,
> has something to add to these cases. If you open your
> country to the world - you _will_ be exploited.
> But, as South Korea, China, and India have learned - you
> are _better off_ being exploited than not being exploited.
> South Korea is virtually an industrialized country, for
> goodness sake. 50 years ago it was rubble.
> This is progress. Every non-industrialized country in
> the world should only hope for such exploitation.
>
OTOH, there�s Argentina and Venezuela, contries that
were rich some years ago and after having opened their
economies to the world are quickly becoming rubble.
Alberto Monteiro
Me:
I would be willing to bet that neither Argentina or Venezuela has had a
Western-Europe equivalent standard of living this century, or ever, in
fact. In fact, I'd bet that neither has come terribly close to that.
Argentina's collapse, which I've followed very closely because of its
obvious relevance to Russia (my field of professional expertise) was
largely linked to its _failure_ to reform its local governments, which were
sclerotic, corrupt, and massively in debt. What wealth they did generate
over the past 10 years can largely be credited to that opening.
Venezuela's problems are similarly largely a product of internal failures.
Note that South Korea, for example, has already largely recovered from the
1998 crisis. India was entirely unaffected by it, as was China (from what
we can tell, anyways). Both remained open to the outside world
(relatively, in India's case) and profited from it. Russia, despite being
hammered worse than anyone by the events of 1998, is now _better off_ than
before the collapse. The argument that states that open to the world - and
then adopt unbelievably stupid economic policies against the advice of the
IMF and World Bank - and suffer for it are demonstrations of the _mistake_
of opening your economy is not convincing. As far as we know, there is
only one path to development. Keeping your economy closed to foreign
investment isn't it.
Gautam
