Mark Morgan wrote:
>When the US decides to do this, though--overthrowing other countries, even for arguably good reasons, I worry that it means we are moving from being a republic to being an Empire.
>
And it's a legitimate concern. An even bigger issues, IMO, is whether or
not it will even work given how we're going about it. German and Japan
show you can use military victories and occupation to radically alter a
country's culture and institutions, but those didn't involve handing
back sovereignty in 18 months or so.
> By that I mean the more time we spend enforcing our values on foreign countries, the more time we will have to spend enforcing our values on foreign countries. Is it really plausible to believe that we can move into a country like Myanmar or Iraq and simply create a United States-style democracy from whole cloth and then go about our merry way?
>
>
Yeah, that's the $87 billion question there. Will it work? I doubt it,
especially if the goal is combatting Islamic fundamentalism. We're
trying to do in a couple decades what took Christianity five or six
hundreds years to work through.
>I see us more having to stay in each place for a depressingly long time, perhaps a generation or more, and the sun never sets on the US empire. Or worse we do half a job of it and leave a trail of disasters behind us. Ugh.
>
I think the latter assessment is likely. I would suspect that 10 years
from now Iraq will be a democracy in the same way that Pakistan is a
democracy. Which is not to say that it is hopeless -- Pakistan is not
hopeless, but Musharraf pisses people off every time he tries to crack
down on honor killings or private parallel tribal justice systems.
People riot in Bangladesh or Nigeria if reporters make mildly
anti-Muslim comments. I mean, living in a country where a man can put a
crucifix in a jar of urine and end up on the government payroll, it's
hard to wrap my mind about just how backward these places still are.
On the other hand, we also sort of assume that it is inevitable that
capitalism and free trade will lead to secularization because that's
largely what happened in the West. But that doesn't seem to be happening
in many of these countries, or if it is happening it's on open question
if the rest of the world can wait 150 years for predominantly Muslim
countries to secularize.
