The Wars That Keep On Giving - How On Earth Did We (USA)Get Saddled With Such Creepy Clients...
When Bush and his MERRY BAND OF NEOCONS set out, blood in one eye and $$$ in the other, to start (preempt) the wars they had craved, for so many years; they acted as though they had a crystal ball and could see into the future.
{This is how we (USA) need to spread
Democracy (Free Trade), since WE are the grownups upon the globe,
it is up to us to tell those too immature to understand how to
live (deregulatorily) ... Even if it takes pre-emptive wars to
make them wise up, that is what we must do...} was the Neocon
mantra.
I wonder what Bush/Cheney and devotees, who were (and are) too big for their BOOTS thinking now, witnessing how wrong they were and how many lives that they were directly responsible for losing due to their immoral supercilious actions?
Never mind, I already know, ARROGANCE OUTMANEUVERS THINKING!
Let us hope that We-The-People will never have to be a party to such horrendous decisions made on our behalf from an unscrupulous few who have the power (GIVEN BY US) to use us to fulfill their sick fantasies. (Forgive me for my cynicism but I really believe it will never end, we will always be used by the powers that be.)
Please read the article below for enlightenment on: “How on earth (did) we (USA) get saddled with such creepy clients as Karzai and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, over and over again?”
thinkingblue
There was some awful news from Afghanistan last week,
overlooked in the midst of Egypt's tectonic eruption. Kabul Bank
is near collapse. Apparently the owners — who include
President Hamid Karzai's brother Mahmood and other assorted
political cronies — had, among other nefarious activities,
taken the bank's assets and speculated in Dubai real estate,
which promptly crashed. The Afghan government does most of its
business through Kabul Bank; if the bank fails, the government
won't be able to pay its workers, including the army. Millions in
international aid may be washed away.
And so, a familiar dilemma: Bail out the bank or let it collapse?
My first thought was that the situation might provide the NATO
coalition with some leverage: we could offer to bail out the
bank, but only if Karzai stepped aside and allowed an esteemed
technocrat — like Ashraf Ghani, who ran for President
against Karzai and was crushed — to run the show in the
interim. But this was no leverage at all, as I learned in
conversations with several Afghan sources. Karzai would just as
soon allow the bank to collapse. "Then he could say [to the
Americans]," a Western diplomat told me, "You figure
out a way to pay the army."
How on earth do we get saddled with such creepy clients
as Karzai and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, over and over
again? In large part, it's a vestige of the Cold War,
when all the world was a potential theater in the struggle
against communism. Afghanistan was certainly one; the Soviet
departure created a vacuum, and the Taliban rushed in. The
Kissingerian effort to transfer Egypt from the Soviet account to
the American side in the 1970s, later perfected by Jimmy Carter,
was certainly another.
Our adventures in the world have been accompanied by a
never-ending tug-of-war between U.S. foreign policy realists and
idealists. Through much of the 20th century, the idealists tended
to be liberals in the spirit of Woodrow Wilson, who wanted World
War I to make the world "safe for democracy." Since
Vietnam, however, liberals have been more pessimistic. They
winced when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil
empire," fearing a nuclear confrontation. They were
infuriated by the naiveté and hubris of George W. Bush's
"Freedom Agenda," which was promoted as a rationale for
the invasion of Iraq after that country's weapons of mass
destruction turned out to be a mirage. They are increasingly
skeptical about the war in Afghanistan and appalled by the
prospect of a pre-emptive war with Iran.
Nowadays, the foreign policy idealists tend to be
neoconservatives — and as Egypt erupted, they were crowing.
"Dictatorships are never truly stable," Elliott Abrams,
the former Reagan and Bush national-security expert, wrote in the
Washington Post. "Regimes that make moderate politics
impossible make extremism far more likely." These were noble
sentiments, celebrating Bush the Younger's agenda. Others cited
Condoleezza Rice's 2005 Cairo speech, in which she publicly
chided Mubarak and called for democratic reform. But Rice's
speech was just rhetoric; in reality, Bush embraced Mubarak as
fiercely as his predecessors, fearing that an Egyptian epiphany
would produce an Islamist government. Indeed, the tangible fruits
of the Freedom Agenda turned out to be mostly rotten: elections
in the Palestinian territories, which no one but Hamas (and Bush)
wanted, produced a Hamas plurality; a push for democracy in
Afghanistan produced a foolish constitution, centralizing power
in a notoriously decentralized country, and corrupt elections.
And the jury is still out on Iraq, where the most vital
"democratic" force may turn out to be the populist,
Iran-leaning cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
The truth is, both strict realism and idealism have failed us
overseas. Too often, realism is just a rationale for maintaining
the autocratic status quo, which never lasts, especially when
presided over by terminal narcissists like Mubarak and Karzai.
Too often, idealism assumes democracy can be plopped into a
culture without a middle class or a history of free institutions.
A smarter foreign policy would quietly promote a careful
transition from autocracy to something more benign. The best way
to do this is to latch onto institutions, not individual leaders,
in the developing countries we seek as allies. Sadly, the most
reliable institution to latch onto — to train, equip and
support — is often the army. Humanitarian aid is nice, but
difficult to dispense and too often corrupted. Military aid comes
with strings that bind — the continuing need for spare
parts, for example. But strong armies create security, a
necessary precursor for democracy.
It is not a sure thing, of course; armies have provided a steady
global diet of horrific dictators. In some cases, like Pakistan,
military assistance helps create greater regional tension. But
when we're lucky abroad, as in Turkey, the military midwifes the
transition to democracy. That will be true in Egypt as well
— and perhaps even in Afghanistan — if we're
lucky.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2045878,00.html#ixzz1FjD4Fd27