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New beheadings in Iraq...
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by David Sands: [QB] Jay, I was wondering if something was wrong with your computer. Nothing was in your post there for a while. Otherwise I would have put this in the above post. I wouldn't call it a democracy taken lock-step from the one in the United States. That's why [URL=http://www.cpa-iraq.org/government/TAL.html]the current government is called the [i]Provisional[/i] Authority[/URL]. Everyone complains that we shouldn't be trying to transplant America to the Middle East. Well, we're not. We're developing it one step at a time. A lot of the criticism centers around what "democracy" is. Everyone has different meanings for it in mind. It might be more useful to say we are increasing the [i]degree[/i] of democracy there. Just like we are increasing the degree of legitimacy there by the baseline behavior of Iraqis toward their government. I won't deny that the government is still weak in areas like Falluja, but but that doesn't mean the prospect is doomed. It just means we need to perservere. As for Alexander Stephens, yes, he was a Confederate. But he had accepted the authority of the US and submitted to it, demonstrating he felt the new government was legitimate. Those governments also elected lots of blacks and Republicans who were capable and able administrators. If one example of past opposition to core principles the nation stands for is all it takes to eliminate the government's legitimacy, then we're screwed since West Virginia still elects Robert Byrd, who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan years before. I know I'm repeating myself, but you're conflating the justifications for the war with talk of "pre-emptive democracy." (Although, I got to say, Jay, that is one [i]cool[/i] phrase!) Here are the justifications properly stated again (and cleaned up from a previous post): 1. Change the regime of Saddam Hussein and help Iraq transition to democratic self-rule 2. Pre-emptively find and eliminate weapons of mass destruction or the ability to resume programs to develop them 4. End economic sanctions and deliver humanitarian support to a starving population 5. Prevent further assassination attempts against the leaders of our country 6. Enforce international law embodied in more than 10 UN resolutions condemning Iraq�s flouting of the armistace signed and agreed to after the first Gulf War 7. Prevent further assistance to terrorist groups (e.g., Abu Nidal, Hamas) 8. Frighten wavering states into stopping support of terrorists and abandoning their WMD programs (whether that happened is contended, though I have read your evidence to the contrary) Not all of them were treated with the same rigor as each other in the media. WMDs stole the show because Colin Powell thought it was the best of the several. That doesn't mean the others were never presented at some point to someone who was keeping track of all the possible jusitifications. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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