Myself, I tend to attribute it to the mongols. The mongols were not very good occupiers. They were unremittingly brutal and they demanded similar brutality of their satraps. Survival meant taking the abuse without visible complaint.

Since that time they’ve been real insistent about accepting strong central authority to handle external invaders. They put up with a whole lot from a government that manages to drive back an invasion. They put up with a lot of military incompetence too, usually.

Yes, gluttons for punishment.

Man, those Russians must have been gluttons for punishment.

Are you suggesting the facts are spin, whereas the spin to suggest Wolfowitz was in the wrong is fact?

What is factually incorrect in the WSJ and Hitchens’ pieces?

I think I speak for all of us when I say ‘?’.

The US backed the opposition movement in the Phillipines all the way through? Really? Including all the time when they backed it financially and militarily?

The fall of the Eastern European regimes owed nothing to the mass movements in those states?

There’s nothing “challenging” about that worldview, it’s just a repeated message which says “US intervention is good for freedom” and sees nothing that might contradict that view.

Exactly, when there is no external meddling, local people will do what they want.

…, and not under popular pressure.

Huh?

Equating Wolfowitz to the Soviets, and that denial of the reality of the concepts of despotism and liberation, requires one to have lost all capacity for judgment.

Why, the Soviets used to talk about despotism and liberation exactly like you and Wolfy, only for the most part their villains were your heroes and their heroes your villains. Why are you so sure your kind of melodrama is better?

As for Iran and Cuba, both fallen regimes were much weaker as they exerted far less control over their people than their successors…

These regimes were highly unpopular and people replaced them with more popular regimes. That’s all there is to it.

People were not fleeing Cuba wholesale in his day…

People are not fleeing Cuba these days either: they are not escaping Cuba to go live in Haiti, for example. Rather, some of the Cubans rush to the US (risking their lives) to receive bribes the US government offers them.

I once had an iranian housemate who told a story—I forget most of the details—an iranian wrestler won the olympics, he got a gold medal. The iranian public considered him a great hero. And the Shah had him killed. I asked, how do you know the Shah had him killed? He said everybody knew. And everybody knew the reason—the Shah couldn’t let any iranian be more popular than he was, because any such person could lead a rebellion. I tried to imagine a revolution against the Shah led by a world-champion wrestler, who’d spent all his time for the last x years studying wrestling. It didn’t make sense. But the Shah was unpopular and any seed crystal could start the transformation.

It’s easy to say that people get the government they deserve, but in practice it’s a matter of technology and organization, technique. A government that has to be repressive is already unstable, but the timing of when it collapses depends on how well it manages the repression versus how well its enemies organise against it. It might possibly totter along for decades if it organises well and its opponents organise poorly.

When the USA intervenes we might take either side or both. Which side we take depends on our strategic interests and also on which side does better PR.

It’s like a soulless machine programmed at random. Do you support the repressive corrupt government or the communist terrorists? It usually depends on which PR you’ve been exposed to and which is effective. Which side does the US government support? It depends on what strategic resources we need, and where we need bases, and lots of things like that, plus they have to pay some attention to the citizen dupes who’ve fallen for foreign PR.

When Castro was trying to take over Cuba he told reporters about how he wanted democracy. For the first election before things were real organised he was going to call in civic groups—Rotary and Lions Club etc to help run the election. He trusted them. We might have supported him. Is there a chance that if we had supported him he’d have gone with a democracy? I say yes, if we’d helped him publicise his plans for democracy he might have had a hard time backing down from them later. Maybe he even believed it when he said it. But we backed Batista.

Who do you believe and why do you believe them? If somebody like Luis is sure we ought to intervene on one particular side, who are we to say he doesn’t know the ultimate truth? He could be right. So the next question is, how much money should we bet that he’s right? How many lives? To the extent that we’re a democracy, how much we bet depends on how much of a betting mood the US public is in at the moment. Before we staged our unilateral attack on iraq, a lot of americans were ready for a nice little bet that we could move in quick and clean things up and the oil would pay for it. I tend to think we aren’t going to feel like that for some years, we’ll need time to forget just like it took us time after vietnam.

But I’d kind of be up for an easy little war in saudi arabia. We could let the egyptian army do the work, we might provide them with transportation and equipment and logistics, and muslim US officers could keep an eye on the operation. Call for democracy in saudi arabia, a democracy of good muslims and infidels would get a voice proportional to their numbers, with full respect for religious sites etc. We could probably pull it off, and if it didn’t work it would be mostly surplus egyptians in trouble over it.

And considering how well things are working out in south africa, a similar solution would probably be the best thing for israel/palestine. Except I don’t think the US public would allow it.

But then I think about the range of possible results of US intervention, and I get a lot less enthusiastic. I get a wonderful idea for how things can be, and I prod the US government into random action, and we get random results….

The US has given, has withheld, and (sometimes, rarely) taken away in the interest of a greater good, if necessary

This doesn`t seem so rare to me. And some of these events – like the destruction of one third of East Timor`s population – hardly rank against the alternatives. Avoiding communism in Indonesia was seen by the US as worth the deaths of perhaps 1 million people, as was fighting communism in Vietnam. Do you really believe the communist order in those societies would have been equally bad?

You may think that its cynical of people in the West to advocate not intervening in other peoples` societies to change them “for the better”, but if so maybe you should visit Iraq. Case in point, and all that. We do have rather a long history of watching warlike US governments “remake” other societies into the stone age. It doesn`t fill us with confidence that the US vision is so much for “freedom” as it is for (as one of Wolfowitz`s mates put it) creative destruction.

I highly recommend reading any thread at theforvm.org that he’s active on.

Best,
Tim (aka catchy).

All those countries in Eastern Europe lost their dictators because the leadership of the Soviet Union cracked, and not under popular pressure.

Equating Wolfowitz to the Soviets, and that denial of the reality of the concepts of despotism and liberation, requires one to have lost all capacity for judgement.

As for Iran and Cuba, both fallen regimes were much weaker as they exerted far less control over their people than their successors; their leaders were far too lax for their own survival.

Batista, like Marcos, had very little in the way of a police state and a tiny military. Batista had no neighborhood committees, did not control the economy and only sporadically limited the press. He even showed mercy to his enemies. People were not fleeing Cuba wholesale in his day, in spite of the fact that there was nothing to prevent them. As a dictator he was weak and lackadaisical.

Come on, Luis, seriously. A whole bunch of Eastern European countries very recently – just as soon as Soviet Wolfowitzs quit trying to make them happy? Iran? Cuba? An unpopular regime gets overthrown, a reasonably popular one survives. It’s your own rhetoric of ‘despotism’ and ‘liberation’ that gets you confused. Avoiding being fooled by your own bullshit is the first step to becoming a realist, and that isn’t such a bad thing.