Wes Clark on bringing Democracy to the M. East

["Sixhits"]

Sorry to post so many topics today. It's been a good day for the sort of things which catch my eye.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0405.clark.html

There's a new article written by Wes Clark, ex-General.

Subtitled: The strategy that won the Cold War could help bring democracy to the Middle East-- if only the Bush hawks understood it.

"...

These neoconservatives looked at the nest of problems caused by Middle East tyranny and argued that a morally unequivocal stance and tough military action could topple those regimes and transform the region as surely as they believed that Reagan's aggressive rhetoric and military posture brought down the Soviet Union.

...

This dream of engineering events in the Middle East to follow those of the Soviet Union has led to an almost unprecedented geostrategic blunder. One crucial reason things went wrong, I believe, is that the neoconservatives misunderstood how and why the Soviet Union fell and what the West did to contribute to that fall.

...

The truth is this: It took four decades of patient engagement to bring down the Iron Curtain, and 10 years of deft diplomacy to turn chaotic, post-Soviet states into stable, pro-Western democracies. To achieve the same in the Middle East will require similar engagement, patience, and luck."


This is a great read.

[Blufire]

On a related note:
Just in economics today, my teacher was talking about how one of the biggest reasons the Soviet Union dropped out of the Cold War and broke up was that they'd been trying to keep up with our industrial output (in the form of defense/military goods). For 40+ years, they pushed their system to its limits and kept up with us at the expense of quality of life for the citizens of the Soviet Union... finally, the people got fed up and broke up the Union.

Was just an interesting viewpoint that I'd never heard before, and made sense, I guess.

I don't know of Clark is right or not, but the idea that we can't force-feed them democracy, that this is going to take a while, makes sense to me.

[Ssickboy]

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/multimedia/index.html

Scroll down to:

Here's a long multimedia story on Iran, "Six Questions for Iran."  15 years of leaving that country alone seems to naturally bring some sense out of it.  I like the direction that it's younger generation will be taking it in.  Great news to give you good sense of how a different culture is developing naturally back into a civilized world.  This comes directly from a country that once called us "the great Satan."  and which Bush has recently charged, "Axis of Evil."  With the best of interests and positive encouragement we can help a place like Iran hold that progression on the right track.  Or we could point some fingers, make some claims, add a little espionage and start a war.  Patriotism can bring a nation together and yet too much of it can tear the world apart.