by Andy » Jun 16, 2004 @ 4:28am
Where is your objection, Jay?
The Euro-commie thing? Truth be told, I hadn't thought of it in this way before now. But, I've seen Thierry talking about (socialist leaning) Americans leaving the US because of the Bush admin and the current political atmosphere. And I have to say, that might just be the best thing Bush has done for me. If only more of them would leave, then maybe I'd get some money offshore before my aggregate tax rate breaks 65%, and the democrats begin their war on "unearned income".
Or was your problem with me not caring what foreigners think about Bush? Well, I don't -- there's not much more to it than that.
Or was your objection with old-Europe having a helping hand in creating the Iraqi quagmire? If that's the case, you might do well to pick up a history book. They didn't mind waging war on Iraq, and then embargoing the fuck out of them: the Western contribution in making Iraq a grade-A mess.
Nor did Old-Europe seem overly concerned that Iraq was not improving under the UN's patented "thumb-up-ass" strategum -- it actualyl seems that Iraq was being made systematically worse by the UN coordinated activity.
Of course, the moment a president comes along who isn't eye-to-eye with his colon and goes in there and fix the situation, his foreign policy is denounced as a travesty. In between drowning girlfriends, I think Ted Kennedy even refers to this war as a "new Viet Nam", or some such bullshit.
Well, if he wants to draw parallels to other wars, lets use WW2. An enemy (Germany/Iraq) was defeated, and then diplomatically gang-raped by the victors. Is anyone really surprised that, in hindsight, Germany turned to a war-machine and an irrational dictatorship to break out from a faltering economy (largely in part to the Treaty of Versailles)? Similarly, would you have been surprised if, after 10 or 20 more years of dragging the Iraqi economy through the mud, if WMD found their way into New York? I wouldn't have been.
In fact, I would have been more surprised if they hadn't. Although I realize that when it comes to nuking NYC, even though there are strong arguments on both sides, most of us can agree that it'd be a bad thing.
And more food for thought: from what I hear the next generation of Hussein was even more insane.
I recommend this book: .
The premise is that, statistically speaking, one of (if not the best) indicators of an unstable nation is it's economic integration with the rest of the world.
My intuition tells me that is a causal relationship. Thus, the best bet in stabalizing a country (especially Iraq) is to globalize it. Iraq is a great candidate for nation-building too; it certainly has a lot to offer and gain in the global economy. And while I'm not the largest fan of nation-building, but it looks like the best solution in Iraq.
UN-sanctioned embargos were the foreign policy blunder, not what Bush is doing. After realizing that embargos were not going to work, forcefully removing Iraq from the global economy might have actually been the absolute worst course of action that we could have taken. I mean, I realize that the social sciences aren't an exact artform, but the world governments really screwed this up.
Now, should Bush have waited for Europe's balls to drop? Maybe. Personally, I think that delegating our actions to the UN bureaucracy would have insured at least two more generations of Hussein. Therefore, in my opinion, Bush made the right decision, with a few minor caveats (no implementation of foreign policy is perfect, afterall).
Last edited by
Andy on Jun 16, 2004 @ 6:53am, edited 1 time in total.