Democrat Presidents and Foreign Policy

[PoliticalChic]

How many times must the same scenario play out....

Here, from Kirkpatricks 1979 essay, "Dictatorships & Double Standards" ...see how easily the name Obama can replace Carter

1. The failure of the Carter administration's foreign policy is now clear to everyone except its architects, and even they must entertain private doubts, from time to time, about a policy whose crowning achievement has been to lay the groundwork for a transfer of the Panama Canal from the United States to a swaggering Latin dictator of Castroite bent….a dramatic Soviet military buildup, matched by the stagnation of American armed forces, and a dramatic extension of Soviet influence in the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, Southern Africa, and the Caribbean, matched by a declining American position in all these areas. The U.S. has never tried so hard and failed so utterly to make and keep friends in the Third World.

2. …United States has suffered two other major blows--in Iran and Nicaragua--of large and strategic significance. In each country, the Carter administration not only failed to prevent the undesired outcome, it actively collaborated in the replacement of moderate autocrats friendly to American interests with less friendly autocrats of extremist persuasion.

3. Yet no problem of American foreign policy is more urgent than that of formulating a morally and strategically acceptable, and politically realistic, program for dealing with non-democratic governments who are threatened by ...subversion.

4. Both these small nations were led by men who had not been selected by free elections, who recognized no duty to submit them selves to searching tests of popular acceptability. Both did tolerate limited apposition, including opposition newspapers and political parties, but both were also confronted by radical, violent opponents bent on social and political revolution. Both rulers, therefore, sometimes invoked martial law to arrest, imprison, exile, and occasionally, it was alleged, torture their opponents. Both relied for public order on police forces whose personnel were said to be too harsh, too arbitrary, and too powerful. Each had what the American press termed "private armies," which is to say, armies pledging their allegiance to the ruler rather than the "constitution" or the "nation" or some other impersonal entity.

5.... positively friendly to the U.S., sending their sons and others to be educated in our universities, voting with us in the United Nations, and regularly supporting American interests and positions even when these entailed personal and political cost.

6. U.S. support continued until the regime became the object of a major attack by forces explicitly hostile to the United States.

But once an attack was launched by opponents bent on destruction, everything changed. The rise of serious, violent opposition in Iran and Nicaragua set in motion a succession of events which bore a suggestive resemblance to one another and a suggestive similarity to our behavior in China before the fall of Chiang Kaishek, in Cuba before the triumph of Castro, in certain crucial periods of the Vietnamese war, and, more recently, in Angola. In each of these countries, the American effort to impose liberalization and democratization on a government confronted with violent internal opposition not only failed, but actually assisted the coming to power of new regimes in which ordinary people enjoy fewer freedoms and less personal security than under the previous autocracy--regimes, moreover, hostile to American interests and policies.
Dictatorships & Double Standards

 

[ekrem]

If you like Mubarak so much and despise Obama so much, you should invite Mubarak to USA to govern the USA.

 

[PoliticalChic]

If you like Mubarak so much and despise Obama so much, you should invite Mubarak to USA to govern the USA.

Ekrem, this is such an insipid post, and empty of the considerations suggested in the OP that it defies response.

 

[ekrem]

Carter lost Iran, Obama lost Egypt. That's the root chord of the song.
In your 2nd line you wrote 'see how easily the name Obama can replace Carter'.
And under point 2 you wrote about 'moderate autocrats friendly to America'.

So I wrote as a response, that you can every time invite those 'moderate autocrats' to govern the USA.
Why are you forcing something on people you wouldn't accept for yourself?

 

[Truthmatters]

Your titile should read DEMOCRATIC presidents

 

[PoliticalChic]

Carter lost Iran, Obama lost Egypt. That's the root chord of the song.
In your 2nd line you wrote 'see how easily the name Obama can replace Carter'.
And under point 2 you wrote about 'moderate autocrats friendly to America'.

So I wrote as a response, that you can every time invite those 'moderate autocrats' to govern the USA.
Why are you forcing something on people you wouldn't accept for yourself?

Can we include:
FDR lost Eastern Europe
Truman lost China

Now, the reason why I state that your response is insipid, is that you attempt to paint Obama and Mubarak as interchangeable..implying that the people of the United States, with our history and experience, are interchangeable with the people of Egypt, with their history and experience.

Is that the argument you would like to make?
I didn't think so.

Now, to head off further misunderstandings, would you claim that the term 'democracy' as we understand it in the US is the same as the term 'democracy' as understood in Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt?

I understand that full and complete answers require more time and effort than a thread may earn, but my point re: Carter and Obama stands.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Your titile should read DEMOCRATIC presidents

You know that I do that to annoy you.

 

[Truthmatters]

So then its OK for people to call the tea party the Tea Bag Party?

 

[ekrem]

(...)
Now, to head off further misunderstandings, would you claim that the term 'democracy' as we understand it in the US is the same as the term 'democracy' as understood in Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt?

I understand that full and complete answers require more time and effort than a thread may earn, but my point re: Carter and Obama stands.

Especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the USA had the power to enforce that the US's definition of democracy is being implemented in countries like Egypt, which were ruled by so-called 'moderate autocrats friendly to the USA'.

Together with Bush's 'Global War on Terror' came a no-look policy and by introducing the term 'Axis of Evil', all those 'friendly autocrats' were put into the 'moderate camp' of Arab nations overnight.
There is nothing moderate about places like Egypt or S.Arabia.

There were a lot of opportunities, were USA could have furthered a democratic and human-rights agenda in those countries. Those opportunities won't come again, and the damage has been done. I know this from my own country, it was always the Europeans who upheld human-rights issues within the relations, Lockheed continued to sell weapons whilst Krauss-Maffei (Leopard) hadn't the permission from German government because of human-rights issues at that times in Turkey.

 

[PoliticalChic]

So then its OK for people to call the tea party the Tea Bag Party?

Well, if you think it annoys me...

 

[Luissa]

How many times must the same scenario play out....

Here, from Kirkpatricks 1979 essay, "Dictatorships & Double Standards" ...see how easily the name Obama can replace Carter

1. The failure of the Carter administration's foreign policy is now clear to everyone except its architects, and even they must entertain private doubts, from time to time, about a policy whose crowning achievement has been to lay the groundwork for a transfer of the Panama Canal from the United States to a swaggering Latin dictator of Castroite bent….a dramatic Soviet military buildup, matched by the stagnation of American armed forces, and a dramatic extension of Soviet influence in the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, Southern Africa, and the Caribbean, matched by a declining American position in all these areas. The U.S. has never tried so hard and failed so utterly to make and keep friends in the Third World.

2. …United States has suffered two other major blows--in Iran and Nicaragua--of large and strategic significance. In each country, the Carter administration not only failed to prevent the undesired outcome, it actively collaborated in the replacement of moderate autocrats friendly to American interests with less friendly autocrats of extremist persuasion.

3. Yet no problem of American foreign policy is more urgent than that of formulating a morally and strategically acceptable, and politically realistic, program for dealing with non-democratic governments who are threatened by ...subversion.

4. Both these small nations were led by men who had not been selected by free elections, who recognized no duty to submit them selves to searching tests of popular acceptability. Both did tolerate limited apposition, including opposition newspapers and political parties, but both were also confronted by radical, violent opponents bent on social and political revolution. Both rulers, therefore, sometimes invoked martial law to arrest, imprison, exile, and occasionally, it was alleged, torture their opponents. Both relied for public order on police forces whose personnel were said to be too harsh, too arbitrary, and too powerful. Each had what the American press termed "private armies," which is to say, armies pledging their allegiance to the ruler rather than the "constitution" or the "nation" or some other impersonal entity.

5.... positively friendly to the U.S., sending their sons and others to be educated in our universities, voting with us in the United Nations, and regularly supporting American interests and positions even when these entailed personal and political cost.

6. U.S. support continued until the regime became the object of a major attack by forces explicitly hostile to the United States.

But once an attack was launched by opponents bent on destruction, everything changed. The rise of serious, violent opposition in Iran and Nicaragua set in motion a succession of events which bore a suggestive resemblance to one another and a suggestive similarity to our behavior in China before the fall of Chiang Kaishek, in Cuba before the triumph of Castro, in certain crucial periods of the Vietnamese war, and, more recently, in Angola. In each of these countries, the American effort to impose liberalization and democratization on a government confronted with violent internal opposition not only failed, but actually assisted the coming to power of new regimes in which ordinary people enjoy fewer freedoms and less personal security than under the previous autocracy--regimes, moreover, hostile to American interests and policies.
Dictatorships & Double Standards

So we can blame Reagan for the problems in Afghanistan?
How about Nixon and Vietnam?

 

[PoliticalChic]

(...)
Now, to head off further misunderstandings, would you claim that the term 'democracy' as we understand it in the US is the same as the term 'democracy' as understood in Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt?

I understand that full and complete answers require more time and effort than a thread may earn, but my point re: Carter and Obama stands.

Especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the USA had the power to enforce that the US's definition of democracy is being implemented in countries like Egypt, which were ruled by so-called 'moderate autocrats friendly to the USA'.

Together with Bush's 'Global War on Terror' came a no-look policy and by introducing the term 'Axis of Evil', all those 'friendly autocrats' were put into the 'moderate camp' of Arab nations overnight.
There is nothing moderate about places like Egypt or S.Arabia.

There were a lot of opportunities, were USA could have furthered a democratic and human-rights agenda in those countries. Those opportunities won't come again, and the damage has been done. I know this from my own country, it was always the Europeans who upheld human-rights issues within the relations, Lockheed continued to sell weapons whilst Krauss-Maffei (Leopard) hadn't the permission from German government because of human-rights issues at that times in Turkey.

This exemplifies a huge lacunae as far as the nature of the United States of America.
Let's begin after WWII, when the US was the most powerful nation on earth, and could have enforced any policies it wished...it did not.
That is the United States.

"the USA had the power to enforce that the US's definition of democracy is being implemented in countries like Egypt, which were ruled by so-called 'moderate autocrats friendly to the USA'."
Sorry...the sentence doesn't make sense to me.
Please restate.

"...'friendly autocrats' were put into the 'moderate camp' of Arab nations overnight.
There is nothing moderate about places like Egypt or S.Arabia."

Rather than demand definitons and examples, let me simply ask, rhetorically: would we and the people of the particular nations have been better off with ChengKaiChek or Mao? Reza Pelavi or the Ayatollah?


"...USA could have furthered a democratic and human-rights agenda in those countries."
a. Well, so could the people of the various nations.
b. Purely hypothetical that we could have done so. Case in point, the Soviet-Egypt pact that never quite worked out for Soviet Planners.
c. You are assuming, again, that 'democracy' in one nation means the same thing as 'democracy' in all nations. That is simply not true, and examples of the unintended consequences are myriad:
1. In Indonesia in the 1980’s and 1990’s, the ethnic Chinese minority, a mere 3% of the population, controlled over 70% of the private economy. In 1998, the introduction of democracy released the built-up hostility of the 95% ‘pribumi’ majority population, and the Chinese suffered some 5000 shops looted and burned, 2000 killed, and many rapes. The wealthy Chinese fled, taking between $40 and $100 billion, resulting in an economic crisis from which the nation has yet to recover.
2. In Zimbabwe, the market dominant minority, of course, were the whites, who had come to Rhodesia from the 19th century and beyond. After the country's independence as Zimbabwe in 1980, what followed was political unrest and the illegal seizure of farms.


Further, consider this in a discussion of 'democracy':

One shouldn’t cherry-pick facts to fit an agenda. The study does say that radicals “believe in democracy even more than many of the mainstream moderates do.” But does anyone really think we’re operating with a consistent definition of democracy here? The Muslim Brotherhood, for example, makes claims to be democratic, yet its leaders-for-life are not elected, the organization boasts a doctrine of female subordination, and it calls for the death of apostates. Kind of a big-government democracy, I suppose.

Dalia Mogahed, Esposito’s co-author, says, “A billion Muslims should be the ones that we look to, to understand what they believe, rather than a vocal minority.” How right she is. We need to find out from one billion rational human beings why they largely refuse to stand up for humanity and dignity instead of cowering in the face of fascist thugs. They’re the only Westerners this study challenges.
Commentary Blog Archive Muslim Survey “Challenges” West

 

[PoliticalChic]

How many times must the same scenario play out....

Here, from Kirkpatricks 1979 essay, "Dictatorships & Double Standards" ...see how easily the name Obama can replace Carter

1. The failure of the Carter administration's foreign policy is now clear to everyone except its architects, and even they must entertain private doubts, from time to time, about a policy whose crowning achievement has been to lay the groundwork for a transfer of the Panama Canal from the United States to a swaggering Latin dictator of Castroite bent….a dramatic Soviet military buildup, matched by the stagnation of American armed forces, and a dramatic extension of Soviet influence in the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, Southern Africa, and the Caribbean, matched by a declining American position in all these areas. The U.S. has never tried so hard and failed so utterly to make and keep friends in the Third World.

2. …United States has suffered two other major blows--in Iran and Nicaragua--of large and strategic significance. In each country, the Carter administration not only failed to prevent the undesired outcome, it actively collaborated in the replacement of moderate autocrats friendly to American interests with less friendly autocrats of extremist persuasion.

3. Yet no problem of American foreign policy is more urgent than that of formulating a morally and strategically acceptable, and politically realistic, program for dealing with non-democratic governments who are threatened by ...subversion.

4. Both these small nations were led by men who had not been selected by free elections, who recognized no duty to submit them selves to searching tests of popular acceptability. Both did tolerate limited apposition, including opposition newspapers and political parties, but both were also confronted by radical, violent opponents bent on social and political revolution. Both rulers, therefore, sometimes invoked martial law to arrest, imprison, exile, and occasionally, it was alleged, torture their opponents. Both relied for public order on police forces whose personnel were said to be too harsh, too arbitrary, and too powerful. Each had what the American press termed "private armies," which is to say, armies pledging their allegiance to the ruler rather than the "constitution" or the "nation" or some other impersonal entity.

5.... positively friendly to the U.S., sending their sons and others to be educated in our universities, voting with us in the United Nations, and regularly supporting American interests and positions even when these entailed personal and political cost.

6. U.S. support continued until the regime became the object of a major attack by forces explicitly hostile to the United States.

But once an attack was launched by opponents bent on destruction, everything changed. The rise of serious, violent opposition in Iran and Nicaragua set in motion a succession of events which bore a suggestive resemblance to one another and a suggestive similarity to our behavior in China before the fall of Chiang Kaishek, in Cuba before the triumph of Castro, in certain crucial periods of the Vietnamese war, and, more recently, in Angola. In each of these countries, the American effort to impose liberalization and democratization on a government confronted with violent internal opposition not only failed, but actually assisted the coming to power of new regimes in which ordinary people enjoy fewer freedoms and less personal security than under the previous autocracy--regimes, moreover, hostile to American interests and policies.
Dictatorships & Double Standards

So we can blame Reagan for the problems in Afghanistan?
How about Nixon and Vietnam?

I think you could probably make a pretty good argument there.

But I would respond by documenting the FDR hand-over of Eastern Europe to Stalin for Afghanistan, and several Democrat Presidents for the cause of US involvement in VietNam.

 

[Luissa]

How many times must the same scenario play out....

Here, from Kirkpatricks 1979 essay, "Dictatorships & Double Standards" ...see how easily the name Obama can replace Carter

1. The failure of the Carter administration's foreign policy is now clear to everyone except its architects, and even they must entertain private doubts, from time to time, about a policy whose crowning achievement has been to lay the groundwork for a transfer of the Panama Canal from the United States to a swaggering Latin dictator of Castroite bent….a dramatic Soviet military buildup, matched by the stagnation of American armed forces, and a dramatic extension of Soviet influence in the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, Southern Africa, and the Caribbean, matched by a declining American position in all these areas. The U.S. has never tried so hard and failed so utterly to make and keep friends in the Third World.

2. …United States has suffered two other major blows--in Iran and Nicaragua--of large and strategic significance. In each country, the Carter administration not only failed to prevent the undesired outcome, it actively collaborated in the replacement of moderate autocrats friendly to American interests with less friendly autocrats of extremist persuasion.

3. Yet no problem of American foreign policy is more urgent than that of formulating a morally and strategically acceptable, and politically realistic, program for dealing with non-democratic governments who are threatened by ...subversion.

4. Both these small nations were led by men who had not been selected by free elections, who recognized no duty to submit them selves to searching tests of popular acceptability. Both did tolerate limited apposition, including opposition newspapers and political parties, but both were also confronted by radical, violent opponents bent on social and political revolution. Both rulers, therefore, sometimes invoked martial law to arrest, imprison, exile, and occasionally, it was alleged, torture their opponents. Both relied for public order on police forces whose personnel were said to be too harsh, too arbitrary, and too powerful. Each had what the American press termed "private armies," which is to say, armies pledging their allegiance to the ruler rather than the "constitution" or the "nation" or some other impersonal entity.

5.... positively friendly to the U.S., sending their sons and others to be educated in our universities, voting with us in the United Nations, and regularly supporting American interests and positions even when these entailed personal and political cost.

6. U.S. support continued until the regime became the object of a major attack by forces explicitly hostile to the United States.

But once an attack was launched by opponents bent on destruction, everything changed. The rise of serious, violent opposition in Iran and Nicaragua set in motion a succession of events which bore a suggestive resemblance to one another and a suggestive similarity to our behavior in China before the fall of Chiang Kaishek, in Cuba before the triumph of Castro, in certain crucial periods of the Vietnamese war, and, more recently, in Angola. In each of these countries, the American effort to impose liberalization and democratization on a government confronted with violent internal opposition not only failed, but actually assisted the coming to power of new regimes in which ordinary people enjoy fewer freedoms and less personal security than under the previous autocracy--regimes, moreover, hostile to American interests and policies.
Dictatorships & Double Standards

So we can blame Reagan for the problems in Afghanistan?
How about Nixon and Vietnam?

I think you could probably make a pretty good argument there.

But I would respond by documenting the FDR hand-over of Eastern Europe to Stalin for Afghanistan, and several Democrat Presidents for the cause of US involvement in VietNam.

Reagan and Bush had more to do with Afghanistan than anyone, Nixon was President when Vietnam ended.
Bush I also, you could say failed to take Sadam out of power. And Bush II was the Saudi Prince's whipping boy.

 

[ekrem]

(...)
"the USA had the power to enforce that the US's definition of democracy is being implemented in countries like Egypt, which were ruled by so-called 'moderate autocrats friendly to the USA'."
Sorry...the sentence doesn't make sense to me.
Please restate.

Between 1985 - ~2006 the USA was the unrivaled Superpower with healthy finances.
In that period the USA could have furthered a true democratic and human-rights agenda in places like Egypt. No front-wind was expected by Soviets->Russia, China.

"...USA could have furthered a democratic and human-rights agenda in those countries."
a. Well, so could the people of the various nations.
b. Purely hypothetical that we could have done so. Case in point, the Soviet-Egypt pact that never quite worked out for Soviet Planners.
c. You are assuming, again, that 'democracy' in one nation means the same thing as 'democracy' in all nations. That is simply not true, and examples of the unintended consequences are myriad:
1. In Indonesia in the 1980’s and 1990’s, the ethnic Chinese minority, a mere 3% of the population, controlled over 70% of the private economy. In 1998, the introduction of democracy released the built-up hostility of the 95% ‘pribumi’ majority population, and the Chinese suffered some 5000 shops looted and burned, 2000 killed, and many rapes. The wealthy Chinese fled, taking between $40 and $100 billion, resulting in an economic crisis from which the nation has yet to recover.
2. In Zimbabwe, the market dominant minority, of course, were the whites, who had come to Rhodesia from the 19th century and beyond. After the country's independence as Zimbabwe in 1980, what followed was political unrest and the illegal seizure of farms.

I am talking about non-democratic countries where fair elections don't happen, countries which have primacy in US's foreign policy, and where the US has established or backed those 'moderate autocrats'.
There is a country like Egypt with a 'moderate autocrat' who controls judiciary and security. He has the full power and makes use of it to design society according to his wishes and crushes opposition. He also has the backing of the Superpower.
a.Under these circumstances people can't establish democracy.
They only can establish democracy if they penetrate the regime's environment of fear and revolt. Exactly what is happening in Egypt.
c.these countries aren't free, the USA could have said: "Listen Dictator, from now on human-rights will have a bigger role in our relationship.".
Once true democracy is established, off course, it will differ from democracy practiced elsewhere. There is religious influence, federalism, centralism, nationalism.
What is universal in democracy is seperation of powers so that rule of law can be established. This misses in those countries, the regime makes what it wants and if people don't follow there is police and judiciary will come-up anyway with a proof. Silencing of opposition.

 

[rightwinger]

How many times must the same scenario play out....

Here, from Kirkpatricks 1979 essay, "Dictatorships & Double Standards" ...see how easily the name Obama can replace Carter

1. The failure of the Carter administration's foreign policy is now clear to everyone except its architects, and even they must entertain private doubts, from time to time, about a policy whose crowning achievement has been to lay the groundwork for a transfer of the Panama Canal from the United States to a swaggering Latin dictator of Castroite bent….a dramatic Soviet military buildup, matched by the stagnation of American armed forces, and a dramatic extension of Soviet influence in the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, Southern Africa, and the Caribbean, matched by a declining American position in all these areas. The U.S. has never tried so hard and failed so utterly to make and keep friends in the Third World.

2. …United States has suffered two other major blows--in Iran and Nicaragua--of large and strategic significance. In each country, the Carter administration not only failed to prevent the undesired outcome, it actively collaborated in the replacement of moderate autocrats friendly to American interests with less friendly autocrats of extremist persuasion.

3. Yet no problem of American foreign policy is more urgent than that of formulating a morally and strategically acceptable, and politically realistic, program for dealing with non-democratic governments who are threatened by ...subversion.

4. Both these small nations were led by men who had not been selected by free elections, who recognized no duty to submit them selves to searching tests of popular acceptability. Both did tolerate limited apposition, including opposition newspapers and political parties, but both were also confronted by radical, violent opponents bent on social and political revolution. Both rulers, therefore, sometimes invoked martial law to arrest, imprison, exile, and occasionally, it was alleged, torture their opponents. Both relied for public order on police forces whose personnel were said to be too harsh, too arbitrary, and too powerful. Each had what the American press termed "private armies," which is to say, armies pledging their allegiance to the ruler rather than the "constitution" or the "nation" or some other impersonal entity.

5.... positively friendly to the U.S., sending their sons and others to be educated in our universities, voting with us in the United Nations, and regularly supporting American interests and positions even when these entailed personal and political cost.

6. U.S. support continued until the regime became the object of a major attack by forces explicitly hostile to the United States.

But once an attack was launched by opponents bent on destruction, everything changed. The rise of serious, violent opposition in Iran and Nicaragua set in motion a succession of events which bore a suggestive resemblance to one another and a suggestive similarity to our behavior in China before the fall of Chiang Kaishek, in Cuba before the triumph of Castro, in certain crucial periods of the Vietnamese war, and, more recently, in Angola. In each of these countries, the American effort to impose liberalization and democratization on a government confronted with violent internal opposition not only failed, but actually assisted the coming to power of new regimes in which ordinary people enjoy fewer freedoms and less personal security than under the previous autocracy--regimes, moreover, hostile to American interests and policies.
Dictatorships & Double Standards

I don't understand your point

Is your point that Republicans Reagan, Bush and Bush did not continue these policies in Egypt?

Or that Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford had no impact on what ultimately happened in Iran?

 

[Bfgrn]

WHY should we listen to Kirkpatrick or any neocon on foreign policy? The neocons and PNAC promoted the 'cakewalk' in Iraq.

At the time of her death, Kirkpatrick was a fellow at the AEI, where she wrote on human rights, UN reform, and international law. She also used this perch to actively promote policies pushed by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a letterhead group based in the same office building as AEI and headed by several neoconservative ideologues, including Irving Kristol's son William Kristol. PNAC played a singular role in championing the invasion of Iraq in response to the 9/11 attacks, arguing in an open letter to President Bush shortly after the attacks that the country should invade "even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack." Kirkpatrick signed her name to this letter, along with a stable of high-profile neoconservatives and/or hardliners, such as Frank Gaffney, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Perle, and Marshall Wittmann.

Shortly after this letter was published, Kirkpatrick wrote an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education in which she expanded on her reasons for why the United States should go to war in response to 9/11. She wrote: "It would be a very serious mistake for the United States not to respond with force.
Jeane J. Kirkpatrick - SourceWatch

 

[editec]

If you like Mubarak so much and despise Obama so much, you should invite Mubarak to USA to govern the USA.

Ekrem, this is such an insipid post, and empty of the considerations suggested in the OP that it defies response.

On the contrary, PC

Kirpatrick's musing on the failings of Carter re Iran really aren't germane to the current problems in Cairo.

Ekrem didn't address those issues you borrowed from K, and instead just addressed your obvious partisan blinders.

You wouldn't put up with Mubarak as POTUS, would you? Of course you would not (unless you were working for him, of course, then you'd love him, I am sure)

So why should the Egyptian people put up with this corruption and incompetent regime?

And THAT really was his point, wasn't it.

 

[Epsilon Delta]

3. Yet no problem of American foreign policy is more urgent than that of formulating a morally and strategically acceptable, and politically realistic, program for dealing with non-democratic governments who are threatened by ...subversion.

Oh Jeane, playing apologist to repressive authoritarian regimes as usual - well, "our" repressive authoritarian regimes, anyway. Sadly for her, there is no morally acceptable way of dealing with brutal dictatorships - as her time with Reagan demonstrated, they went for "strategically" acceptable ways, ie. selling weapons to the here-much-maligned Iranian regime and engaging in a brutal war of terror against Nicaragua, in her two examples.

In either which case, I'm glad Reagan had her as an adviser, he absolutely needed her strong moral compass to determine just how much more moral it was to financially and politically support the overwhelmingly benign Saddam Hussein against those evil Ayatollahs! I mean, anyone else would've thought "Hey, this guy is brutally murdering the opposition and committing a genocide against a minority" - but FUCK, Jeane could at least see that unlike those evil Ayatollahs he didn't have such an unruly beard - and at least he didn't depose our benign, benevolent, bleeding-heart friend the Shah, who, I mean, c'mon, he may have had private armies that swore loyalty to him over the nation and he may have suspended democracy indefinitely, and he may have used police forces that were too harsh and brutal, but hey, he sent his kids over here! That's gotta count for something. We'll convince him to democratize eventually - right?

If only, just if only the Iranian people had waited a little longer, I'm sure Ms. Kirkpatrick would've convinced the Shah to bring democracy to Iran, because, really, he wasn't so bad. Just like she would've definitely done with her good friend (literally) her good friend General Leopoldo Galtieri, Butcher of Buenos Air- oh, I'm sorry, benign autocrat of Argentina, who started a pointless war against Great Britain so that his constituency would forget about the fact that he "disappeared" thousands of people for thinking the wrong way. But hey, we all make mistakes, and nobody's perfect.

Anyway, I dunno about you PoliticalChic, but people can only take it up the ass by brutal dictatorships for so long before shit hits the fan. Obama is not "losing" Egypt. Egypt is fighting for its freedom from a brutal 30-year dictatorship that your President's timid statements almost implicitly support. You're suggesting he should do more? You're suggesting that the US government should go ahead and send some emergency stealth planes to save the sclerotic, corrupt regime of an 82-year old autocrat?

And then you'll wonder "Why do they hate us?"

 

[PoliticalChic]

3. Yet no problem of American foreign policy is more urgent than that of formulating a morally and strategically acceptable, and politically realistic, program for dealing with non-democratic governments who are threatened by ...subversion.

Oh Jeane, playing apologist to repressive authoritarian regimes as usual - well, "our" repressive authoritarian regimes, anyway. Sadly for her, there is no morally acceptable way of dealing with brutal dictatorships - as her time with Reagan demonstrated, they went for "strategically" acceptable ways, ie. selling weapons to the here-much-maligned Iranian regime and engaging in a brutal war of terror against Nicaragua, in her two examples.

In either which case, I'm glad Reagan had her as an adviser, he absolutely needed her strong moral compass to determine just how much more moral it was to financially and politically support the overwhelmingly benign Saddam Hussein against those evil Ayatollahs! I mean, anyone else would've thought "Hey, this guy is brutally murdering the opposition and committing a genocide against a minority" - but FUCK, Jeane could at least see that unlike those evil Ayatollahs he didn't have such an unruly beard - and at least he didn't depose our benign, benevolent, bleeding-heart friend the Shah, who, I mean, c'mon, he may have had private armies that swore loyalty to him over the nation and he may have suspended democracy indefinitely, and he may have used police forces that were too harsh and brutal, but hey, he sent his kids over here! That's gotta count for something. We'll convince him to democratize eventually - right?

If only, just if only the Iranian people had waited a little longer, I'm sure Ms. Kirkpatrick would've convinced the Shah to bring democracy to Iran, because, really, he wasn't so bad. Just like she would've definitely done with her good friend (literally) her good friend General Leopoldo Galtieri, Butcher of Buenos Air- oh, I'm sorry, benign autocrat of Argentina, who started a pointless war against Great Britain so that his constituency would forget about the fact that he "disappeared" thousands of people for thinking the wrong way. But hey, we all make mistakes, and nobody's perfect.

Anyway, I dunno about you PoliticalChic, but people can only take it up the ass by brutal dictatorships for so long before shit hits the fan. Obama is not "losing" Egypt. Egypt is fighting for its freedom from a brutal 30-year dictatorship that your President's timid statements almost implicitly support. You're suggesting he should do more? You're suggesting that the US government should go ahead and send some emergency stealth planes to save the sclerotic, corrupt regime of an 82-year old autocrat?

And then you'll wonder "Why do they hate us?"

You guys just don't get it, do you.

Another populous, pivotal nation falling away from the Western sphere...another piece of the jigsaw puzzle of the Middle East...

You don't see the effects on terrorism, how this will guarantee attacks on our nation. "By the age of 14, Ayman al-Zawahiri had joined the Muslim Brotherhood....often described as a "lieutenant" to Osama bin Laden,..."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayman_al-Zawahiri

You don't see the results for the price of oil....there is no alternative; green energy is a fraud.

You haven't learned what the results of turning over Iran to the radicals by Carter I.
So, did you see an increase in 'democracy' in this Iran over Palavi's Iran?

Does some esoteric description of 'democracy' include the massacre of the Copts? The Jews?

Now Egypt submitted to the radicals by Obama (Carter II). Another weak leftist ignorant of human nature, or the existence of evil. Another excuse for moral relativism.

Did you- or Carter II see it coming? Know why? The Democrats saw to it that
we have no human assets in the intelligence networks...see the Pike Committee, the Church Committee, Torricelli, Biden, Leahy...all Democrats, all emasculated our abiltiy to 'see in the dark.' Go ahead, Google them, and their effects on our intelligence networks.

Some of you fellas never studied contemporary history...some, and this is worse, are wilfully blind because you can see the fingerprints of the left on this fiasco.