Aaahhh! I hit send by accident before I could finish - or edit, for that matter. Damn. Well, I'll wrap up anyways below-
International politics is a brutal, Darwinian world where "red in tooth and claw" is what you say about the wimps. <Start continuation here> We don't support these people because it's fun, we do it because there is no better alternative. The particular case of Afghanistan should end these debates, because it should now be obvious to anyone why we often have to work with some really unpleasant people. At least, unlike not just our enemies but most of our allies, we usually try to make sure that the people we work with are better than the people they're fighting - that's progress in and of itself. But in the end, nations have interests. They have things that they _have to do_, whether it be killing Al Qaeda or stopping their enemies from gaining another foothold in our areas of influence. When you have to do those things, your moral obligation is, first, to make sure that your overarching cause is just - as it was, and is. Then you look at the country where you have to work, and you evaluate the different sides. Part of that is admitting the fact that often - even usually - both (or all) sides are bad. Often both sides are really bad. Now, because of the principles for which we stand, most of the time the side that we support is less bad than the other side. Right-wing dictators are usually better for the people they rule than Communist ones. Not a lot better, but better. As Pinochet (for example) was clearly a hell of a lot better than Castro. Then your choice is ugly, but not terribly hard, because you're both helping yourself, and the people of the country in which you're getting involved. Sometimes you have a really nasty situation, where the side that wants to work with you is worse than the one that works with your enemies. Guatemala is probably a pretty clear cut case of that - there aren't many (if any) others. In that case, you've got an ugly, unpleasant decision to make, and you have to balance the harm done to the population to the importance to the cause as a whole. In Guatemala we were almost certainly wrong. But we weren't wrong for fun, we were wrong because it was an ambiguous situation and we did the best we could, and that just wasn't good enough. But most of the time, when faced with choices like that, we chose well. You never did answer my basic point, Doug, which is that we weren't faced with a choice between good and bad, we were faced with a choice between bad (that supported us) and worse (that didn't). Apparently you think that we should have done nothing. But then worse might have happened and the people of those countries would have suffered _more_. Are you seriously arguing to me that would have been a superior moral position for us? In a fairly obvious example from before that in WW2 we were faced with bad (Stalin) and worse (Hitler). Bad was much, much worse than anyone else we have supported anywhere in all of history. How come that doesn't bother you? Even more, had we done that often enough, we would have lost the Cold War. Are you arguing that _that_ would have been preferable to what we did? I doubt it. So, I've challenged you before on this, let me try again. Apply your elevated moral principles to the _specific_ cases we face right now - Afghanistan and Iraq. If dealing with bad people is morally unacceptable, as you argue that it is, with whom would you have us work? Where would you find people who meet your moral standards? What makes you think they are capable of defeating those whom we are fighting, particularly since they have to stick to only Marquess of Queensbury tactics? How would your way of conducting foreign policy protect us from Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein? Gautam
