Dan wrote:
OK, but I was specificly referring to the leverage our government had with other governments. We clearly have a strong cultural influence in Arab
countries....even one of the Palestinians celebrating 9-11 was wearing a US sports tee shirt. Yet, that is an area where we have little leverage. We had a lot more leverage in Tawain and the Phillipeans.
Our meme might take longer to catch on in the Middle East, but I think given time and nurture it would have caught on eventually.
The military wanted to keep Communism at bay. I think I can see that as their bias.
But why did they want to keep communism at bay?
OK, using that hypothesis, we should see multinationals all over the
dictatorships in Africa and virtually none in places like India, which has been democatic for >50 years, right? It doesn't seem to work that way.
Africa is a complicated quagmire with a history of established European overlords. Look at the history of central and South America to understand what I mean.
Now, I'd be happy to agree that businesses are after profit, which is
inherently an amoral stand. If a horrid dictatorship is sitting on easy to obtain oil, there will be a company that will more than happy to make a
profit off it. If that dictatorship poses a threat to the US, there would still be US companies selling to it (e.g. Haliburton selling A-bomb
triggers to Iraq in the 90s).
But my point wasn't about the influence of the US culture or businesses, it was about the US government. Insofar as the military desire to see no more Communist governments came into play, I can understand why anti-Communist
dictatorships would be embraced. When Communism fell, that needed did
also, and the right-wing dictatorships lost their bargining chip with the
US. This meant that the US's leverage with those countries increased, and, by my hypothesis, the percentage of dictatorships in countries in Latin
America should have fallen significantly after the end of the Cold war. By your hypothesis, there should have been a much smaller effect. The
military would still want control, and multinationals would still want
profit. Only if one agrees that the military wanted to defend the US at
virtually all costs can one argue for a strong military influence resulting in the preservation of right-wing dictatorships. I would agree to this bias by the military during the Cold war, but not afterwards.
You'll recall that I agreed with most of your hypotheses in my first post. I think one of the things you're missing, though, is that U.S. intervention to prevent the spread of communism was a failed policy well before the fall of the Soviet Union. Starting with our miserable failure in Viet Nam continuing through the overthrow of the Shah and the expulsion of Marcos, and culminating in the Iran Contra fiasco, the U.S. Public's support for "friendly despots" was on the wane well before the end of the cold war.
And I have to return to the reason we wanted to stop the spread of communism. IMO it was more about protecting our commercial interests than our ideological ones. That's not to say we didn't have ideological interests, but that maybe it would have been more effective in the long run for these states to find out for themselves that communism doesn't work.
I believe in the strength of our meme - or what it was before the present administration anyway, and I think that the excessive use of force by our military obscures that message. That's not to say that a strong military isn't important or that we should never intercede, just that I believe that we should let our good ideas do as much of the work for us as we can get away with even if it takes considerably longer.
-- Doug Good things come to those who wait maru _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
