Aripyanfar wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Wrong question. Imagine that the US government didn't have a constitution which protected its citizens... If only someone cared enough to help us.
BUT THIS IS NOT THE REAL REFLECTION OF THE RECORD OF INTERNATIONAL ACTS OF THE USA IN THE PAST 60 YEARS.
I think you quoted the wrong section of my post. That part is imagining if the US was more like Iraq or Afghanistan. Which is valid for the comparison that is being made here. Did you mean this:
Aripyanfar wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Then imagine that in this alternate universe the Chinese had a century long history of intervening in situations like this, helping create or restore governments where liberty and rule of law reign rather than rule by fear.
BUT THIS IS NOT THE REAL REFLECTION OF THE RECORD OF INTERNATIONAL ACTS OF THE USA IN THE PAST 60 YEARS.
Isn't it? The US is well known for involving itself in military action to help liberate other nations and then turning control of those nations over to their citizens after helping to establish a government based on liberty rather than fear. We did this in Europe after WW2, remember? We're one of the few (only) superpower in the history of the world which has *ever* done this. Recall that after WW2, the Soviets placed the nations they'd liberated behind an Iron Curtain and oppressed them for 40 years.
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The USA, in at least 70 cases in the past 60 years, has intervened to help DEPOSE democratically elected governments where liberty and rule of law reigned rather than rule by fear.
You have a source for this? And let's not compare apples to oranges. We're talking about soldiers in the streets, not CIA guys working behind the scenes. The case being made is that it's the soldiers occupying these countries during the process of tearing down the old and building the new government that makes people rise up an form insurgencies and terrorist cells. That's the Ron Paul argument. I don't recall him speaking about secret ops run by the CIA.
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The USA, in at least 70 cases in the past 60 years, has intervened to help INSTALL dictatorships which didn't have a constitution that protected its citizens. That routinely used secret police to round citizens up and torture and then disappear them. That used constant fear of what it could do to its citizens to keep everyone in line and doing whatever it wanted.
Again, do you have a source for this? Because while I'll agree that in a couple cases in South America, this may be true, 70 seems like a nutty high number (unless you're arguing that the US has managed to depose the governments of like 1/3rd of the worlds nations over the last 60 years). Also, we have to look at intent versus result. When we use small CIA teams to topple regimes, we kinda don't have nearly as much control over what replaces them. One can argue that the direct military approach used by Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq (which Paul so strongly disagrees with) was designed to put sufficient force in place to deal with the inevitable rise of equally or more ruthless replacements for the guys we'd just deposed.
Yes. It costs a lot more. Yes, it puts our soldiers in harms way. But absent that cost, as you seem well aware of, the result is more often a worse condition for the people of those countries than before. You get that it's the insurgencies which you have to fight through to prevent a dictatorial outcome, right?
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In no case has the USA itself intervened when foreign nationals alone were suffering under a dictatorship.
A whole lot of people in Europe would disagree. The Belgians were not suffering under a dictatorship in the 1940s? A while lot of people in Eastern Europe would also disagree. The Romanians were not suffering under a dictatorship during the cold war? An interesting side note to the whole war on terror thing. Did you ever take a look at the list of nations in the "alliance of the willing"? Lots of folks dismissed it as a list of smallish and unimportant nations, but if you looked close you'd have seen that nearly all the former Soviet Satellite states were on the list. Funny that. Perhaps their liberation as a direct result of US foreign policy actions (not invasion in that case, but still) was recent enough that they remembered what it was like to live under such oppression and thus supported action to end it in other nations.
Perhaps those nations who dismiss such attempts have forgotten something?
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So, given its recent past history, (recent as in living memory), foreigners are NOT going to Imagine that the US military has come into their country to liberate them from fear, torture, and oppression. Foreigners would not regard such claims cynically, but with outright disbelief. The onus is on the US to prove that disbelief wrong.
A whole lot of Iraqis would disagree with you there as well. They certainly were happy when US forces removed Saddam from power. And even during the worst periods of insurgent fighting, polls in Iraq consistently showed that they viewed themselves as better off as a result of the US action than they'd have been otherwise. I imagine that this view is even stronger today. Nothings perfect, but I think it's foolish to focus only on the negatives.