Gautam wrote: > 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 sure?
But that is not my point. You said earlier that there was a pragmatic justification to replace enemies with allies, and I said that I agree with this; however, don't claim _also_ that this is a moral thing to do. Because if it requires changing an enemy that treats fine his subjects to a genocidal ally, the pragmatic position of the USA _will_ do it. Me: First - it is, in fact, the nice thing about the interests of the US that we won't ever be in that situation. Because American interests are so closely tied to American principles, that situation is quite impossible. But, even if it were, no, we _wouldn't_ do it. There is no possibility that we would do it. There's no case of us ever doing it. So I deny that claim. We wouldn't. > 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. > And all Eastern Europe was better under the dominion of the USSR than it was under the previous dominant power [[ok, I'm cheating a little bit in bringing _that_ evil power to this discussion O:-)]] Me: Yes, but the purpose of the Second World War was _not_ to free Poland from Nazi tyranny to replace it with a slightly less bad Soviet tyranny. > 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. > But the USA Army did it in Vietnam. Heck, the USA Army is doing it in Colombia right now, using defoliating poisons to destroy the cocaine plantations while poisoning children at the same time. Me: While I'm not thrilled about our Colombia policy, we're not doing it _on purpose_. Actually, I want a cite on that. I'm pretty familiar with our Colombia deployment and I don't think we have anything approaching the men available to do what you are describing. In terms of Vietnam - without fighting that whole battle over again - by the standards of anti-guerrilla campaigns we fought a very clean war, one far better than that fought by our enemies. When we caught a major violator of human rights - Calley - we prosecuted him. I believe that he is still in jail. Admittedly, I would have had him shot, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find a similar example. > 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. > There's no need to make the USSR look more satanic than it was. The human rights record in East Europe was far better than in Latin America, during the dark ages of the cold war. Me: Not true _at all_. I think you're basically buying generations of Communist propaganda here, Alberto. It's simply not true. While the economy was not nearly as good in Latin America (well, depending on where you were) in just about every country political freedom was considerably greater than it was in Eastern Europe. Nor, for that matter, was it entirely, or even largely, an American responsibility. Take some responsibility for your own region of the world, for goodness sake. We aren't omnipotent. The greatest part of the destiny of any country lies with the people of that country. Alberto: If the USA wants to be a new kind of Empire, there are moments when the USA must _not_ act in its own interest. Me: There are moments when we can _refrain_ from acting when it might be in our interest, possibly. But I believe that our interests are, over the long run, the interests of the people of the world. They aren't necessarily the interests of the _governments_ of the world, but that's not my concern. > 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. > But that's what the Brazilian government does, sometimes. Sending a few dozen men to East Timor, for example, had no benefit for any br citizen. Me: As opposed to, say, fighting a war in Yugoslavia, invading Somalia, and so on. I'm not criticizing Brazil's government - I'm glad that they do that. But I think that some perspective comparing the scale of American efforts in humanitarian missions - and even more, what we have _refrained_ from doing given what we could do, given the power at our disposal, needs to be considered. > _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. > I agree with that. Again, this is not my point. I question the morality of "destroy my enemies and replace them by allies". This policy is amoral, and makes the USA no better than the USSR or the Roman Empire, because sometimes it will make the USA replace benevolent dictators by genocidal maniacs. Me: When my enemies are immoral, then it's a perfectly moral policy. During the Second World War we fought to destroy our enemy (Nazi Germany) and replace it with our ally (what would become the Federal Republic of Germany). By _your_ standard, this makes the Allies in the Second World War no better than the Roman Empire, and makes the Western allies no better than the USSR. For that matter, it makes the Nazis the same as the allies. I can play WW2 games too, Alberto :-) The difference is _whom_ you replace, and with _whom_ you replace them. Note also that the more power the US has in controlling the new government, the better it ends up being. The US has its greatest influence in the Western hemisphere - and every Western hemisphere government (save Cuba) is democratic. And Cuba, of course, is the country where we have the least influence. Even more clearly, in Japan and Germany, where we had total discretion as to the governments we would create, we created two liberal democracies with human rights records every bit as good as our own. That says something. Alberto: Argentina [and Uruguay] _had_ a Western-European standard of living during the XX century. And Venezuela got enough oil to be able to get it. Me: When? Saudi Arabia has more oil than Venezuela, and it doesn't. Oil isn't enough. In some ways, oil probably hurts you, actually. Alberto: But Argentina adopted the unbelievably stupid economic policy that was _dictated_ by the IMF. Heck, the IMF even suggested that Brazil should replicate Argentina's currency board! If the collapse of Argentina was that chaos, can you imagine the same thing happening to Brazil? I imagine that by now we would be building A-Bombs and selling them to Iraq Alberto Monteiro Me: And, for a very long time, the currency board worked. It was quite successful. Now, I'm not a universal defender of the IMF. I think it's made a lot of mistakes. But it's an indepedent institution, not an arm of the American government. And it has always _tried_ to do the best it can, to the best of its knowledge. Unless you're arguing that the IMF purposely tries to harm the economies of the countries it is aiding, I don't really see what your point is, to be honest. Why, for that matter, do you think industrialization will be painless? The only decade of the 19th century I can think of in which the American economy did _not_ collapse was the 1860s, and they were kind of absorbed by other things. Immature economies tend to be erratic, to put it mildly. It takes a long time to develop the stability that now characterizes the industrialized West. Just because there are problems along the way doesn't mean that the system has failed - the Great Depression didn't mean that capitalism was a disaster, it just meant it wasn't perfect. Well, life isn't perfect. That's just the way it is. Gautam
