SeasonSpeech wrote:
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Not acting in Iraq (ME in general) simply maintains status quo, which generated a terrorist group willing and able to fly airplanes into multiple large buildings and kill several thousand people. That's what "not doing anything" gets us.
America hasn't "not been doing anything" since we came out of the Great Depression. We gave weapons, training and money to Osama in the 70 (Later on same thing to Hussein) to fight communists or others we didn't like. And on the other side of the world, just about every right wing south American dictator was backed by America, like Pinochet who over threw the POPULARLY elected communist government.
Yes. Exactly my point. In the ME specifically, we (and by we, I'm including all the industrialized nations, not just the US) have propped up petty dictators in power and kept them there via a combination of direct support and massive amounts of oil money. As long as "we" continue to buy oil from the middle east, we can't say we're not interferring with their local politics. We *are*. Like it or not.
My point was that we're *already* doing that. That's what we've been doing for the last 70 years in that region. That's why we're hated so much. The only real difference between what we've been doing all along and what we're doing right now, is that the average member of the public *knows* we're interferring now, but didn't really understand before. People get in an uproar when we invade Iraq, but quietly accept subjecting millions of people in that region to incredible amounts of poverty, pain, and death at the hand of regimes we put in place and maintain purely because they don't see the direct line between the gas they buy at the pump and the cost to those people. And as long as the public doesn't see the man behind the curtain they continue to be ignorant of that cost and continue to support the "status quo" policies of the west towards the Middle East.
That is the alternative to invading Iraq. And that's *exactly* what brought about the conditions that caused the 9/11 attacks. Get it? You are free to disagree with our actions in Iraq, but then you need to explain to me what other action you'd take that is *not* just more of "maintaining brutal rulers in power". The invasion of Iraq *might* just create a democracy in Iraq. It *might* build a better nation for the people living there. And it *might* just reduce the number of unhappy people down the line that want to kill us because we've put them in states of misery. It *might* do those things. But doing nothing, and just continuing as we have for the last 70 years is absolutely guaranteed to cause continued and ever worsening terrorist action against us. That's a given.
That's not a real alternative, is it?
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But we have a great potential to reduce future terrorist recruitment in that region if we're able to succeed at bringing Democracy to Iraq.
Not everyone in the world wants a republican government.
Yes. But the only way their "wants" are realized is if they are given the power to choose, right? It's a catch-22. I can't say what the people of Iraq want. Neither can you. But if we give them a choice (ie: a vote), then they can decide that for themselves. That's "forcing democracy on them", but what's the alternative? You're presenting this idea as though there's a scope of possible governments that extends outside of democratic ones, but then you also assume that the process to determine which one to use is democratic. The real answer is that people either have the choice and the power to realize that choice, or they don't.
You talk about what the people want, but that's only relevant under a democratic form of government, right? Your complaint "not everyone wants a republican government" is only a valid one if the people already exist in a republican government. It's completely irrelevant. If they don't have one, then they don't get a choice either way. If they do, then they have one, and are stuck with something they don't like. Boo hoo! Personally, I'll give them democracy and let them choose for themselves rather then listen to some halfbaked complaint lacking in any logical sense.
