The title of this thread is the most important lesson I have learned from the endless pontificating by talking heads of all breeds on America's foreign policy decisions of the past years.
We hear over and over again how the US government screwed up (repeatedly) in giving arms and assistance to the Afghan rebels during the Cold War, and then once the war was over, leaving them be, only to have them turn on us twenty years later.
The goal of our intervention in Afghanistan back then was to prevent the spread of communism, which we saw to be a coruppt and detrimental political system (we were right, but that's another argument.)
We accomplished that goal, dealing the Soviets a defeat which in no small part contributed to the eventual collapse of the USSR and the move towards freedom in Eastern Europe. We avoided a wider war, by fighting by proxy. The alternative, which no one found acceptable, were either sending in our own troops, or letting the USSR take Afghanistan, thus bringing them one large step closer to controlling the lifeblood of the Western World, the oil fields of the Gulf. (Remember, there were numerous other pro-Communist groups in the Middle East, including 1/2 of Yemen for a time.)
It WAS the best decision that could have been made at the time. Unfortunately, it required the use of some unstable characters.
Some say we should have stayed around and helped rebuild. Very possibly. We WERE the largest international contributor of money and relief to Afghanistan, before these recent events. (One wonders how much the talking heads gave.) However, the presence of so many westerners in that area would not have had a stabilizing influence, either. In fact, it is one of the main reasons cited for BinLaden's attacks.
Some say we should reconsider our support of Israel. That is exactly what the terrorists want most, which is the reason we should not give it to them. What they seem to be forgetting is that the Israelis twice defeated massed armies of several nations arrayed against them, BEAT them, and doubled the size of their held territory. WE are the ones who got them to give the Siani BACK to Egypt. We have done a great deal to KEEP Israel from retaliating with full force when it was attacked. Remember the Gulf War? Iraqi Scuds hitting Israeli cities? Did they strike Back? Who convinced the not to? Tell you the truth, I'd wager the Israelis would have tripled their territory by now, if we hadn't been holding them back.
So we return to what I've been saying. These talking heads haven't made a policy decision in theior whole lives beyond what color socks to wear. The decisions that have been made were the best that could be made with the information available. Those who disagree should present their own, viable solutions, or cram their criticisms where the sun don't shine.
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These talking heads haven't made a policy decision in theior whole lives beyond what color socks to wear.
No offense, Rob, but, uh, neither have you.
If they can't talk about past foreign policy decisions, what gives you the right?
[ October 19, 2001: Message edited by: Malnurtured Snay ]
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I'd wager the Israelis would have tripled their territory by now, if we hadn't been holding them back.
Right. Because we all know that the Israeli's tanks and F-16s were built in a small warehouse in an industrial park in suburban Tel Aviv.
I'm criticising the 'talking heads,' true... but then again, I AM qualified to be a talking head, so I'm able to criticise them.
The_Tom: what, and you think the Arabs built THEIR own T-tanks and MiG's?
[ October 19, 2001: Message edited by: The_Tom ]
Isrealies are not as "backward" as you guys thought, they can, and already has built all form of weapons for their own army, airforce and navy.
They built their own ships, they built their own tanks, and they build their own warplanes.
They developed "Kfir" fighter, and it is still in service.
They also developed "Lavi" which surpass American F-18 and F-16's performance (and that's why the project was scrapped thanks to American pressure).
Python 4 made by the Israelies are the best short range air-to-air missile in the world right now.
Israelies developed and built the tank "Merkava" all by themselves, and it is ranked as the same performance level as M-1 and surpass that of T-72 used by other Arab countries.
Israelies also designed and built the "Saar" class missile boat which incorporate the latest in steath technologies and equipped with full arrays of best weapons the world has to offer, of course, many of them are made by the Israelies.
All the the examples above just prove that Israel is not a "baby" that can't leave the American's craddle of protection, they have the ability to do everthing themselves.
[ October 19, 2001: Message edited by: BlueElectron ]
In hindsight, it is always easy to judge. That does NOT mean, however, that we all should just refrain from criticizing. Far from it. And I despise anyone who spews this "either come up with some good ideas yourself, or STFU" crap.
This is still a free society in which people have the right to voice their opinions, thank you very much.
[ October 19, 2001: Message edited by: Mojo Jojo ]
[ October 19, 2001: Message edited by: The_Tom ]
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But there is a difference: _I'M_ not criticising anybody.
You've never criticized the decisions of any polticial leaders up to today? You haven't criticised Bill Clinton's administration? You crit just as much as anyone, just not on this specific issue.
And that's a horseshit reply, Omie-san. What gives him the right to criticize and tell others they can't? Hmmm?
[ October 19, 2001: Message edited by: Malnurtured Snay ]
Two seperate forms of criticizm.
It is bad to criticize foreign policy of the past. It is okay to criticize foreign policy of the present. Therefore, by that logic, it must be wrong to criticize the Clinton administration, right?
What Omega seems to fail to realize, is that the criticism of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East -- and to be fair, Carter got us into the Afghan thing -- dates back to another old policy called 'Containment', which got us messed up in this tiny little Asian country called 'Vietnam' as well. As some of you who actually have a passing familiarity with history may be aware, Vietnam and Containment policy were protested long and hard in the 60's. U.S. foreign policy has *always* been criticized. Yet, now Rob says it's bad for us to critique stuff that happened in the past. Omega ammends that to say it's okay to critique stuff as long as you critique it when it happens. What Omega fails to realize is that it *was* critiqued when it happened! And it's still being critiqued!
Whatever.
[ October 19, 2001: Message edited by: Malnurtured Snay ]
Um... wouldn't that simply be restating the exact same idea?
What Omega fails to realize is that it *was* critiqued when it happened! And it's still being critiqued!
Criticizing foreign policy when it happens is good. Criticizing foreign policy a decade or two after the fact is dwelling on that which can't be changed, and thus a waste of energy. In foreign policy, the same situation rarely repeats itself twice except on the most general level, so learning from what may or may not have been a mistake is very difficult.
In a case like this, the past is useful for understanding the present, but criticizing it is pointless.
What I'm telling you, is that the policy *was* criticized when it happened. It's not like people are looking back "gee, what can we bitch about?" They've been bitching about it since it happened.
Here we see a double-standard at work. The talking heads can criticize everything and anything, but nobody can criticize the talking heads.
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(a) forcibly doubled its size through conquest,
There is a moral difference between aggresively conquering your neighbors (which Israel didn't do) and being ganged-up-upon by several other countries, defeating them anyway, and then creating 'buffer zones' to preserve your central core's security.
Put it this way: if the US and Russia declared themselves enemies of Canada and attacked, and Canada somehow fought back and kicked ass, siezing, say, Alaska and Maine and part of Siberia in the process, and kept them (later giving back Siberia as part of a peace deal), that would be different than if Canada had simply attacked and taken Alaska and Maine without being provked.
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(b) became far and away the most-heavily armed nation between Europe and the Indian subcontinent, and
If you faced CONSTANT, fanatical aggression, you'd soon find that it was practical to be more well-armed than your adversaries, too.
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(c) developed the military-industrial conplex to independently maintain that status to the present day.
How else would one do (b)?
[ October 20, 2001: Message edited by: First of Two ]
The debate here is whether we can call those policy decisions 'mistakes.'
'Mistake' implies that there was some other, better course of action that could be taken. Since all the talking heads, even with the added superiority of 20/20 hindsight, have thus far utterly failed to come up with any alternative favorable scenario, one must conclude that the actions were not mistakes at all.
As Trek has put it... "It is possible to make no mistakes, and still lose."
And criticizing a LACK of error is meaningless.
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The talking heads can criticize everything and anything, but nobody can criticize the talking heads.
Feel free to criticize. I see another double standard, though ... follow me on this.
Are you going to stop bashing on Clinton any time soon? I doubt it. So, you would still be able to criticize past political leaders and decisions, while at the same time urging the lefters on this board (me, Jay, Tahna, Tom, others) not to criticize the U.S.'s containment policy (which, ironicly, came out of Truman's administration).
Please address this concern.
This was proven patently ridiculous when after the reunification of Vietnam, communists in South East Asia proceeded to spend twenty years slaughtering each other. Communist revolutionaries were never one big happy family working together towards a common goal whatsoever, but usually nationalists first and foremost who tacked Marxism on as a way to garner the support of the peasant classes and rebel against a feudalesque elite. (see: anywhere in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America). "Aggression" can be proven in every case have little to do with the USSR moving pieces into place to create a new world order (or have we forgotten that Stalin completely threw out Lenin's ideas of sponsoring international communist revolt when he shut down the Comintern?) but rather it lending armed support to causes sympathetic to it, because it was in its self-interest to have more friendly countries in its camp. First goes on and on about how countries can never be expected to do anything but whatever is in the self-interest. This is very clearly another case.
The US failed to contain communism in South East Asia and, yes, in hindsight, the world did not end. But guided by this false principle that it might, it pumped millions of dollars into a war that ended up destroying funding for important reforms at home as well as thousands of young lives. Ultimately it ended up protecting a corrupt elite class from a populist-but-not-democratic nationalist movement. For First, in, ahem, hindsight, to say that attempting to contain something that was proven could not be contained led to the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union twenty years afterward and therefore made the policy a rip-roaring success is ridiculous.
As Jeff has said, people at the time weren't so stupid as to be completely blind to possible outcomes when the war was underway. People were making the point that US support of a corrupt and unpopular regime was morally ambiguous and that such heavy losses were not a reasonable price to pay for keeping communists out of half of a tiny country. People critiqued the Domino Theory from the moment it came out. And it wasn't just dirty long-haired univerity students, but academics and politicians, and yes, talking heads. On a foreign visit to the US in the sixties, Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson (who had earlier picked up a Nobel Peace prize from stopping your fanaticism about containment at all costs leading to an invasion of Egypt), delivered a rather famous speech at a university (whose name escapes me, will look it up) in which he said that military intervention in Vietnam was emerging as a patently stupid exercise. Soon after, he visited LBJ in the Oval Office, and LBJ was furious enough to pick up the much-shorter Pearson by the neck and hold him against the wall screaming at him for daring to criticize America's plan to save the world. While its usually now only quoted as one of the more unusual stories about Canadian-American relations, it proves my point adequately. The "talking heads" of the time were saying containment was flawed, in hindsight correctly, and American politicians, Republican and Democrat alike, were too arrogant to admit the heads might be right.
I have neither the patience nor the motivation to pull apart your thoughts on the justification of Israeli aggression. Yet.
Nonetheless, this little nugget needs to be questioned:
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There is a moral difference between aggresively conquering your neighbors (which Israel didn't do) and being ganged-up-upon by several other countries, defeating them anyway, and then creating 'buffer zones' to preserve your central core's security.
Your arguments seem to boil down to "Israel beat the Arab states in war and it is therefore justified to occupy Palestinean territory" Apparently military might therefore gives one the right to rule over others who have no wish to be ruled by you.
At last First of Two is unmasked as Franz Joseph Hapsburg!
[ October 20, 2001: Message edited by: The_Tom ]
Some of their failures were largely due to our intervention.
Our intervention was largely due to our policy of Containment -- to keep Communism from spreading any farther, whenever and wherever we could.
Both sides spent a hellacious amount of capital, men, and resources on these struggles.
In the end, we outspent them. Resources they spent fighhting us in Vietnam could not them be re-used in other places.
As for 'conquest by war' you are totally missing the point. We're not talking about annexxing smaller countries to use as a buffer zone. We're talking about using the captured territory of the people who attacked FIRST.
If you want to know the truth, I believe that if a man tries to mug me, and I knock him down and out, I'm entitled to HIS wallet. If cops bust a drug dealer and take his briefcase full of cash, they should be able to use that money to finance more antidrug efforts. If another country attacks you and you kick its ass, you have the right to hold any territory you sieze during the war.
*Crazy hypothetical speculation follows*
If Canada were to attack Maine (although I can't see why anybody would want to), and the US were to beat the Canadian forces back across the St. Lawrence, then everything south of that river is OURS, man. Fairly won. Because they attacked first, and when you accept a course of action, you accept its consequences.
Heh. Accepting consequences. Some people who can't stand the 'reset button' on Star Trek, want to try and press it in the real world.
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The Communists attempted to foment revolutions across the glome in numerous small countries. In a few cases they succeeded (Nicaragua, Vietnam), in other cases they failed.
No, they didn't. In almost every single case, from Southeast Asia to Latin America, the revolutions were caused by nationalist groups that revolted in most cases against a wealthy ruling elite, never democratic and usually corrupt, an elite which drew its power from American business interests and ran an economy in which the vast majority of the population was incredibly disadvantaged. They were therefore labeled Marxists.
So yeah, these rebels have a revolution going. They need arms. During the cold war, they could get them from one of two camps, the West or the Communist bloc (Angola being a notable exception where there was a third camp, South Africa, present). If the rebels were enemies of the interests of the West, as they usually were, that narrowed things down to who their choices for supporters could be. If the rebels were enemies of the interest of the Communist bloc, as they were in Afghanistan during the eighties, that narrowed things down to who their choices for supporters could be.
And, the Cold War being the Cold War, the various camps were usually all-too-willing to contribute. Did that mean that the rebels and their sponsors were part of a masterplan together? Of course not. In many cases the rebels hated their sponsor's guts, the most obvious examples being Iraq and the Afghani Mujahideen. The North Vietnamese recieved piles of money from the Chinese, then promptly pissed them off to the point that they were invaded by them, for heaven's sake.
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As for 'conquest by war' you are totally missing the point. We're not talking about annexxing smaller countries to use as a buffer zone. We're talking about using the captured territory of the people who attacked FIRST.
That's exactly what the Soviet Union did after WW2. And I thought we agreed that this was a bad thing.
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Here we see a double-standard at work. The talking heads can criticize everything and anything, but nobody can criticize the talking heads.
No, the double-standard is that you criticize the talking heads and call it freedom of speech, but when you're criticized in turn, you call it 'censorship'. That's the real double-standard here, isn't it?
Also, the simple fact that I don't think you'll stop railing about Clinton any time soon, thus proving you a hipocrite about your whole 'don't bad-mouth policy of the past' line of reasoning.
If you recall, I said I'd stop wayyy back in the 9-11 thread... and even THEN, I talked about GORE.
Oh, and mentions of Clinton in retaliation for mentions of Reagan/Bush etc don't count.
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Oh, and mentions of Clinton in retaliation for mentions of Reagan/Bush etc don't count.
Fine. By that logic, I win any polticial discussions from here on out.
On a more serious note ...
They most certainly do. If your attitude is that people can't criticize past decisions, then you're a hipocrite when you do it no matter the circumstances.
And since Omega agrees with you, it'll be double the fun!
[ October 20, 2001: Message edited by: Malnurtured Snay ]
You cannot use HIS speech to attack MY arguments. We're very different. He's a true believer. I'm skeptical. It just so happens that his beliefs and my skepticism overlap in this particular instance.
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That's exactly what the Soviet Union did after WW2.
Inaccurate. Poland and the Baltic countries were free states before WWII, the USSR and Germany had a secret treaty to divide them BEFORE the Germans attacked (that the Germans broke the treaty immediately is irrelevant), and the Russians then went on to annex/conquer countries who'd been steamrolled by the Germans -- NOT German territory, NOT 'fairly won.'
Poland aside, you fail to note that a good 50% of Germany's Pre-WW2 area was occupied by the USSR. (East Prussia and all of West Prussia and Pomerania east of the Oder.)
Bringing this back to the Palestinean situation, you seem reluctant to make distinctions between Palestineans and Syrians and Jordanians and Egyptians labelling them all as "Arabs," and making this a fight between two sets of interests only. Wrong.
The Soviet analogy stands. Israel (that is to say, the portion of the former British mandate of Palestine that was partitioned for Jews in the 49 UN plan) was invaded by the alliance of Arab states that surrounded the ex-mandate territory, crossing in some cases through the UN-administered portion of Palestine set aside for Palestineans. Israel won, thanks to American military support. Israel proceeded to occupy Jerusalem (not set aside for Jews in the 1949 plan) and about half of the Palestinean territories and embarked on a campaign of ethnic cleansing to clear all Arabs out of the conquered territories. What was left of the original Palestine mandate (about 25% of the total area) was occupied by Jordan (the West Bank) and Egypt (the Gaza strip). In subsequent wars in 1967 and 1976, the Israelis conquered the remainder of what had been the Palestine mandate and eventually, in the name of creating buffer space, occupied the Sinai (which had always been Egyptian) and Golan Heights (which had always been Syrian).
The Israelis were at war with the Syrians, Jordanians and Egyptians. They weren't at war with the Palestineans because the Palestineans didn't have a state of their own and had no army. They ended up occupying the entirety of the internationally-designated portion of the Palestine mandate set aside for Palestineans. I think that "fairly won territory" is an oxymoron, but even by your disturbing definition, First, half of all Israeli territory was conquered.
Hell, even the Soviets had the common decency to even allow the Poles and Czechs independent states in name, even though they were run by totalitarian puppet governments. The Israelis just swallowed up the lands of their weaker neighbors and called it Israel, then governed them at the whim of the Jewish citizenry.
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You cannot use HIS speech to attack MY arguments. We're very different. He's a true believer. I'm skeptical. It just so happens that his beliefs and my skepticism overlap in this particular instance.
I think you misunderstood, Rob. Since Omega apparently subscribes to the notion that criticizing decisions of the past is bad, I'm going to have fun jumping on his back whenever he criticizes Clinton or Gore or whomever in coming debates
What if Germany had taken them over twenty years earlier, and they had basically become accepted as being part of Germany? Would it have then been okay for the USSR to do the same stuff they ended up doing in reality?
[ October 21, 2001: Message edited by: Sol System ]
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What if Germany had taken them over twenty years earlier, and they had basically become accepted as being part of Germany? Would it have then been okay for the USSR to do the same stuff they ended up doing in reality?
Only if 'them' had attacked Germany, rather than the other way around.
MAKING war on your neighbors is unacceptable.
However, if you make war on your neighbors, and get spanked, you deserve what you get.
Your problem with my problem is that you seem to be having difficulty telling the moral difference between starting a fight and finishing it.
Kids on a playground. One of the kids is beating up the other, smaller kids and taking their lunch money. This is bad.
But then this kid goes to beat on another small kid, who just happens to be trained in karate. The small kid knocks him to the ground and takes HIS lunch money. This is NOT bad. It's good, just, and fair. Because the little kid didn't start the fight... but he finished it.
The British colonized Palenstine. When they withdrew, they didn't give it to the Palestinians, they gave the land to Jews, many of who started coming over by the bucket load from Europe.
So, what you've got is a European power coming over to the Middle East, essentially taking it over, and then, when they finally leave, not giving it to the people who owned it before, but to another group of people!
Is that moral? I mean, I can understand why the Palenstines were pissed -- especially cause the British broke their promise to give the country back to them, and gave it to someone else.
I guess I don't completely agree with how you see moral. For some reason, I didn't think you thought what happened to the American (as in, the continent) Indians was moral ... ?
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The Israelis were at war with the Syrians, Jordanians and Egyptians. They weren't at war with the Palestineans because the Palestineans didn't have a state of their own
Quibble #1: You forgot to include the Iraqis and the Lebanese in the first war, they attacked, too.
Quibble #2: By that time, you mean. They HAD had a state before the first attack. The fact that the U.N. didn't give them ALL of the area was their beef (and where are the UN-supporters here?)
Which begs the question of whether Palestine was any more a state than an idea. It's a name of a region, but not a nation any more than the U.S.'s Appalachia. It didn't exist before the UN partitioning, it ceased to exist one day later in the war, so was it ever 'really' there?
And let me say that the guy who stands by and cheers on the lynch mob is just as much the enemy as the guy who holds the rope. (And if you don't think the Palestinians helped the invaders... naive. In fact, the encyclopedias say that the invaders were there "to help the native Arabs destroy Israel.")
Wasn't the rhetoric of the time about 'pushing the Jews into the sea?' I'd think that meant they intended genocide... pretty much ANY action is justifiable when you're trying to avoid that, including seizing the territory of the guys cheering on the lynch mob.
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the British broke their promise to give the country back to them
WHAT promise? certainly you're not referring to the Balfour Declaration, which said the exact opposite, and British insistence that the territory that they held "should not be considered in any future boundaries of any Arab state."
See?
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~gov46/uk-promis-arabs-1915.gif
[ October 23, 2001: Message edited by: First of Two ]
I, for one, am just trying to show how this issue isn't exactly black and white.
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I guess I don't completely agree with how you see moral. For some reason, I didn't think you thought what happened to the American (as in, the continent) Indians was moral ... ?
I don't. The Indians were invaded by hostile occupying forces, enslaved, forcibly relocated, etc usually without having attacked or assisted in any attacks, first When they were treated with respect, or left alone, there was generally little conflict. (Always some, but that level of conflict existed long before whites came.) They had to be taught to hate the Europeans, and they (the Euros) did a good job of teaching. So I wouldn't consider most Indian attacks and such as part of a separate conflict, but part of one large one.
[ October 23, 2001: Message edited by: First of Two ]
Conservatives, at least the current model, are not known for liking the United Nations. Yet, here we have a conservative repeatedly granting that the United Nations had the authority to do something.
Weird. Nothing is the same after 9/11.
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Quibble #2: By that time, you mean. They HAD had a state before the first attack.
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The fact that the U.N. didn't give them ALL of the area was their beef (and where are the UN-supporters here?)
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Which begs the question of whether Palestine was any more a state than an idea. It's a name of a region, but not a nation any more than the U.S.'s Appalachia. It didn't exist before the UN partitioning, it ceased to exist one day later in the war, so was it ever 'really' there?
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And let me say that the guy who stands by and cheers on the lynch mob is just as much the enemy as the guy who holds the rope. (And if you don't think the Palestinians helped the invaders... naive. In fact, the encyclopedias say that the invaders were there "to help the native Arabs destroy Israel.")
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Wasn't the rhetoric of the time about 'pushing the Jews into the sea?' I'd think that meant they intended genocide... pretty much ANY action is justifiable when you're trying to avoid that, including seizing the territory of the guys cheering on the lynch mob.
As for the Balfour declaration and stuff: Yeah, the British were making promises to both at once. The Balfour declaration, ahem:
quote:...was indeed a statement of support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and was a result of the Rothchilds pouring a rather large sum of money into the British treasury during WWI to bail them out when war expenses threatened to bring down the Bank of England. This "donation" was granted on the condition that Britain would do what it could to help the Zionist movement once the Ottomans were expelled.
Balfour Declaration, letter prepared in March 1916 and issued in November 1917, during World War I, by the British statesman Arthur James Balfour, then foreign secretary in the cabinet of Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Specifically, the letter expressed the British government's approval of Zionism with "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." The letter committed the British government to making the "best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country." (from Encarta)
Meanwhile, that little figure you might have heard of called Lawrence of Arabia was working with the Arabs to clean the Ottomans out of their lands. The Palestineans essentially won the freedom of their own land, which is a lot more than, say, what the Poles or Hungarians managed to do. There were also numerous British foreign policy communiques, most notably that of McMahon, that supported the idea that every national group who fought against the Ottomans would be given the right to self-determination and self-rule of their own submerged states once the war was won. The British and French carried through with this promise first to the Saudis, and then after a mandate period, to the Iraqis, Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians. But not the Palestineans, because (a)the British and French gave away half of Palestine to the Jews, and (b) didn't take action when Israel, "justly," as you say, occupied the remaining parts of the Palestine mandate, forever preventing the Palestineans from their right to self-determination. They and the Kurds are the only people who didn't get a state of their own after the old empires were dismantled at Paris in 1914.
So yeah, the British made promises to two people and couldn't keep both. Let's burn Liam to death.
On a side note, one of the later, more cynical views of history, is that the UN stood by and let the Jews declare the state of Israel despite the lack of a consensus in Palestine of who owned what because they thought that Israel would be promptly demolished by its angry neighbors and it would all be a moot point anyway. Nobody seriously thought the Israelis could win the 1948 war and thought that if they were stupid enough to intentionally piss of the Arab peoples around them that they deserved to be beaten up. Of course, when they not only won but increased their territory, they were rather quick to back off.
A cynical view of history, and not necessarily mine 
[ October 24, 2001: Message edited by: Mojo Jojo ]
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Conservatives, at least the current model, are not known for liking the United Nations.
I am not 'the current model.'
Or to quote another...
'I am unlike any life form you have encountered before.'
[ October 24, 2001: Message edited by: First of Two ]
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I am not 'the current model.'
Yes, but he's speaking of conservatives in general, not specific. There are exceptions to every rule.
I mean... SUDAN???
[ October 25, 2001: Message edited by: First of Two ]
Have I perhaps detected a double standard here?
[ October 25, 2001: Message edited by: Mojo Jojo ]
Commander Tucker "Sonofabitch."
Dr. McCoy "Well I'll be damned."
Counselor Troi "I'm sensing an intelligence."
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Probably the same region that holds China's admission into the World Trade Federation.
Have I perhaps detected a double standard here?
No, I'm not entirely in favor of that either. (Although I'm not entirely sure that that was "my side's" doing.) Don't assume I stick straight to party lines.
But in any case, it's still not the same... the WTF is several miles over from the Human Rights Council. One's primarily economic, the other's supposed to be political/humanitarian.
Fine by me. Let that region of the world handle itself however it wants...