Doug: I could have told you that if you get in to bed with the devil you'll have hell to pay, that's a no-brainer.
Me: And there are, of course, lots of saints in the world just begging for American support. If you find any, let me know. Doug: When has propping up a dictator or supporting a despot worked to our advantage in the long run? From Marcos to the Shah, Papa Doc, to Hussain, the clowns in Viet Nam or the zeros in Central America too numerous to count, when has it ever been anything but an embarrassment to our country and a black mark on our record? Me: In the long run, as Keynes said, we're all dead. But if you want a first example - well, Stalin in the USSR comes to mind, or was winning WW2 not enough of a success in the long run for you? No? How about the various military dictators in Korea, where we managed to keep that country out of Communist rule for 50 years and eventually turn it into a stable liberal democracy? The Philippines, where Marcos worked with us for almost 40 years? That would be the long run, alhtough I don't actually think it was worth it in his case. The Shah worked with us for two decades - that's a long time. Hussein was the critical factor in crippling the Iranian revolution - this was, on the whole, a good thing. As far as I can tell, Doug, your vision of politics is that if we didn't get involved, everything would turn out all right. That's nonsense. In almost all of these cases _there wasn't someone else out there_. The country could _either_ have been run by a Soviet supporting dictator, _or_ by an American supporting dictator. There was no option of "liberal democrat" because that's not a common thing in the world. As far as I can tell, you, Nick, and Dan are chiefly concerned with keeping our own hands clean. As long as _we_ aren't involved with it, the bad things that happen aren't such a big deal. Well I don't think that way. As long as there's less dirt at the end of the day, the blackness of my own fingernails isn't such a big deal. Which of us is more moral in that situation? Doug: Doesn't Alberto's opinion of the U.S. give you a clue as to the effectiveness of our policy? He said: "I have to repress my childhood education to accept the idea that _both_ sides in the Cold War - and not only the USA allies - were pro-dictatorship, pro-torture, against free press and against human rights." We all know Alberto to be, reasonable, well educated, fiscally conservative (with a Republican like distrust of big government) family man. That he would have the above impression of my country - whose very existence is supposed to represent human rights and freedoms - is profoundly embarrassing to me. How many millions of people across the globe have this kind of impression of us because of our past indiscretions? There are many things good and right about our country, but supporting morally depraved dictators isn't one of them. To resume this kind of policy, one we seem to have thankfully abandoned in recent years, would be a travesty. -- Doug Me: Well, first, it tells me that we're still here and won the Cold War. I think that was a good thing. Second, it tells me the (rather unsurprising) fact that Brazil was far less interested in the Cold War than we were. No shit. People's perspectives differ based on where they are. To someone from Central America, the US intervention was a big fat hairy deal, and the threat of Communist dictatorship was a distant prospect. The government that we supported was bad, while the (probably worse) government that would replace it if we _didn't_ support it was, again, a distant prospect. People's perspectives are different based on where they are. I don't share the odd presumption that just because someone's different perspective says that my country was wrong, they must be right. An easy example. Mahatma Gandhi is most people's pick for the best man of the twentieth century. During the Second World War, what was his position on fighting the Nazis? He didn't really care. To some extent, he took advantage of the Nazis to imrpove his own position, and he continued to make life difficult for the British. Now, from my distant perspective, I think he was wrong. Defeating the Nazis was _far_ more important than Indian independence. He _should have_ lined up immediately with Churchill for the cause of the greater good of humanity. But the fact that he didn't doesn't make him any less noble and good a man. His perspective was different from mine. The Nazis were a distant evil, the British occupation an immediate one. Fighting the immediate one, even at the cost of helping the distant one, seemed like a good deal to him, as it would have to me, in his position. We stopped supporting dictators because we _didn't have to_ anymore. We didn't do it for fun, despite what you and Nick seem to think. We did it because it was necessary. Moralists like Jimmy Carter did it just as (actually, much more) enthusiastically than hard edged realists like Ronald Reagan, because they agreed that it was necessary. Once we had disposed of the Soviet Union - in large part because we were willing to do the unpleasant things that make you uncomfortable - we didn't have to do it anymore. So we stopped. This was good. I'm in favor of not doing it when we don't have to. Now we have a new threat, based in Afghanistan. Which liberal democracy was on Afghanistan's borders that we could have worked with to overthrow the Taliban and uproot Al Qaeda? _There wasn't one there_. They don't exist. There weren't Afghan patriots schooled on Locke and Mill either. The fact that we managed to dig up someone as good as Karzai is nothing short of a gift from God, actually. In most of the world, there is no such thing. In those parts of the world where such things do exist, of course, they exist in large part because of our efforts. But in Central Asia, as in Central America, or Africa, or Southeast Asia, they don't exist. Period. Now, Central Asia just got prety important. And those governments just got pretty important. So our options were: 1. Invade Pakistan (or some other Central Asian country, but probably Pakistan) conquer it, and use it as a base to attack Afghanistan while establishing a new democratic government and presumably putting down the massive popular uprising against us. 2. Ally with a bunch of dictators and support their government in exchange for achieving our pressing objective. 3. Do nothing and wait for Al Qaeda to blow up New York with a nuclear weapon. So, which ones of those would you have picked? On the whole, I think number 2 was the better option. If it means that there is a remote possibility that 50 years down the road, we might be somewhat unpopular with the people of those countries, well, that's better than the alternative. Basically, Doug, you want to be liked by the rest of the world. That's nice and all that, but I'd really rather not get killed by terrorists, or lose the Cold War, or end up in a Nazi concentration camp because I was too fastidious to work with Stalin to defeat Hitler, and if being unpopular is the price of that, well, bring it on. Being popular probably isn't an option for the most powerful nation in the world ever, and it's probably a lot less likely when we are faced with an implacable enemy that has a substantial hold on global intellectuals who are happy to slant things on its behalf. Then we're probably _really_ not going to be popular. When there are lots of countries in the world that are screwed up, what is easier to do - blame the United States, or acknowledge that most of what happened is your own fault? That will make us _really_ unpopular. People's perspectives are different from ours. We have to run a global international political system populated with a lot of really unpleasant people. That means that we have to do things that people in particular regions will sometimes not like. Hey, that makes us unpopular again. International politics is not about popularity, because the world is not a democracy. International politics is a brutal, Darwinian world where "red in tooth and claw" is what you say about the wimps.
