Gautam Mukunda wrote:
> 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?
>
I don't disagree that we sometimes have to make a choice between bad
and worse, but I do disagree that that's what has happened numerous
times in the past. Often we were acting on our economic interests
and it had little to do with the politics or what was right or wrong
for the people most directly effected.
You say communism is almost always worse than fascism, I disagree.
At least a communist insurgency _can_ have been motivated by
idealism - an attempt to improve the circumstances of a destitute
people. Fascism is almost always about greed and power. Which is
worse, an attempt to improve the lot of your people with a flawed
economic system or a attempt to brutalize and impoverish your people
in order to make yourself more powerful? Even in your example of
Stalin and Hitler, The communist was the bad and the fascist was the
worst, though I don't think that there was much of a difference
between the two. There were people that understood that at the time
and thought we should have finished the war in Moscow.
And what about Castro. The real reason he garnered so much hatred
from the U.S. is that he confiscated U.S. property. Cuba was being
and had been raped by U.S. businesses (and U.S. organized crime) and
by U.S. backed dictators. If we had played the role of the
benevolent neighbor, allowing the popular leader his economic
experiment but encouraging him all along to see the wisdom of our
system, how long would have communism lasted in Cuba? This is an
outstanding case of how we didn't have faith in our own system.
And what if we had played along with Ho Chi Mihn? Could things have
turned out any worse than they did?
And how much military effort did we expend trying to get rid of the
Sadinistas when all it took was a democratic election? And in any
case, was Ortega worse than Samoza?
And how do we know if Allaende was worse than Pinochet if we send
the CIA in to shoot him before he has a chance to lead the country
he was elected to?
There may be times when we have to choose between bad and worse, I
agree, and I'm not saying we have made a wrong decision in the most
recent crisis. I think we can do good things for Afghanistan and
have a positive influence in that part of the world. But there are
times in the past that we made shameful decisions and we should have
the courage - the moral fortitude to admit to ourselves that we were
wrong sometimes - that we should have made discussions based on what
was best for the people directly involved and not on our own
economic interests. Finally, we should learn from our mistakes make
every attempt to make the right decisions in the future.
I don't think we're that far apart, Gautam, I really don't. I do
think you have a hard time admitting _anything_ the U.S. has done
was flawed.
--
Doug
Who knows he probably spelled some names wrong, but doesn't have the
moral fortitude to look them up. ;^)
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.zo.com/~brighto
"Now people stand themselves next to the righteous
And they believe the things they say are true
They speak in terms of what divides us
To justify the violence they do"
Jackson Browne, It Is One
