>>It is not Iran's ambitions to "leadership" that I am worried about - no one but Shiites would follow them anywhere. It is their millenarian thinking. If you believe we are in the end times then you play an end-game. It is the reason I would not want to see Pat Robertson with his finger on the Big Trigger.
>
>I'd prefer that Big Trigger didn't exist - and actually don't see why is Reagan so praised, he restarted the whole armament game just when it was beginning to peter out. In a world where any nation thinks it can't be safe from their ideological enemies unless it gets the nukes, all the ideological enemies will eventually want to have the nukes. Peace is good for business. War is good for business. If you're selling weapons, that is.
>

Yes, and I'd prefer to live in a land of gumdrop trees and the big rock candy mountain, but we live in the world we have and the world we have has nukes. I am frankly a lot more afraid of the ones in Pakistan than the ones-to-be in Iran. I'm not afraid of the Pakistani nukes leaving the country on a rocket, but in a cargo container. I believe in interfering in their internal affairs in *any* way necessary to keep that from happening.

As to Reagan ... if you believe the perpetuation of the USSR would have been a good thing then Reagan was definitely a bad thing. I don't and he wasn't. Not a big fan in some areas, but on the Evil Empire he had it right. Remember which way people ran when the wall went down and how quick the statues came down.

I don't know where you were from 1980 - 88 but as to the arms race petering out that just wasn't the case. Everyone was armed to the teeth, so it wasn't about throw weight or the number of missles anymore, but it was about a hundered proxy wars so that the missles wouldn't fly. And the subtext was about whether or not the West would accept that this totalitarian abomination would continue. Carter's peopel - notabley Zbiggy - accepted the advance of Soviet power as inevitable. Reagan - and good ol' Bill Casey - didn't believe it. They upped the ante and pushed the Soviets into bankruptcy (albeit without knowing how sucessful they were being.) But don't think for a minute the USSR just fell - it was pushed. Historical inevitablity wasn't so inevitable when the right people refused to believe it.

>>Everyone has given it up, now that the Soviets are kaput. The new game is far different (and yet, as you point out in your remarks on globalization, remarkable similar.) But that means you can't use Amerikan Imperializm as a scapegoat for the ills of 'developing nations'.
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>Yep, the name of the game has changed. It's still "all your {insert asset} are belong to us", it's just that we don't bother, in most cases, to establish a regime. We just pwn the current one by bribing them with the money from the loan that will keep their country in debt forever. So we don't really need to be an empire, nor a country, to do that. We can be IMF, or just a bank. Consortium sounds nicer. And somehow, there's the whole international legal system to guarantee that we'll either make money on them, or that we'll own their asse..ts forever.

Countries that are in debt forever are more in debt because of the Swiss bank accounts of their leaders than the predatory lending policies of banks - who have a vested interest in their prosperity as it is as consumers that they are most valuable.

And why do you think there is some international law that protects these banks? Even if there were, what is the enforcement mechanism?
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>>Ground rules for limiting carnage are not a structure of international law.
>
>See above - how come, then, that the debts of the developing countries are firm? If international law wasn't there, these debts would be worthless, and the banks wouldn't go into reprogramming etc. They'd have cut their losses decades ago and stay away. But they don't. So there's some international law which guarantees the sanctity of their property. I expect nothing less and not much more to apply to sovereignty of countries. That much international law, applied across the board, would be a very good start, as long as it applies to all, regardless.

These debts ARE worthless. That is why the banks keep restructuring the debt and taking advantage of whatever accounting fiddles they can to write off the losses and still keep the balls in the air.

What guarantees the sanctity of their property are the huge bribes they pay to the local governments you want us to respect. Used to be the royal navy or the Marines would discourage nationalization but now it has to be more subtle. You seem to think if the debtor nations refuse to pay you can take them to some court that will make all right.

>>Exactly how do you get nations that are actively working to establish Sha'ria to sign on to international law?
>
>You get your best diplomats to work on it. You lead by example. C'mon, who am I to teach you diplomacy?

The first example you must set is to show them you are not an idiot. if you try to talk about our concepts of law and human rights to someone who believes that by definition any law that is not Sha'ria is evil you've got a lot of negotiating to do. I don't know who the "best diplomats" are you have in mind but any that I can think of know that. The others never got outside a classroom at the Woodrow Wilson school in Princeton.

>
>>Iraqi legal system wasn't good enough for anything. The trial was a sop. They were going to hang him - as well he should have been - and they wanted to dress it up. US played along for reasons that were entirely pragmatic.
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>You mean it was one of those "it looked like a good idea at the time"?

What, hanging him? Sure. Who cares. Personal I'd have given him and his whole crew to the Kurds to use for handicrafts. The issue was keeping the lid on while bungling the post-war. In the great scheme of things what happened to Saddam is not even a blip compared to things like "de-Baathification" and doing the occupation on the cheap where we got it wrong and it *did* matter.

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>>>>The intervention in the affairs of others may or may not be a good idea based on circumstances.
>>>
>>>Not a good idea, based on principle. In the same Judeo-Christian tradition it's the marxist idea of the golden rule (and not the cynical "got gold, make rules").
>>
>>If your neighbor is abusing his child and your reporting it to the police has yielded no result and you have the physical power intervene and you hear screaming ...
>>
>>Principles are complex.
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>Aha... specially when they cried "wolf" several times and you really don't trust any of them, specially the guy who came running to your door saying he heard screaming, while still stuffing freshly printed money into his pockets. This screaming argument has become worn out, because it was staged so many times - by your guys. And by guys who know how to make news. And by guys who wanted their fifteen minutes of fame. And by...

Not sure that is an effective response. i am talking specifically about personal responsibility vs "I wash my hands from making judgments I will leave it to the Authorities"

>
>>>And the perpetrator reserves the imperial rights to decide what's good, what's greater good, and which nations are too stupid to think for themselves (and give the wrong answer to "who owns your oil" again).
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>>Making decisions involves responsibility. Not acting is also a decision, but it is easier to deny responsibility.
>
>So you HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY? Wow. And that's the responsibility to react to whatever any government (not of the "our thug" persuasion, but of "their thug") does against its citizens and neighbors, but you don't have any responsibility to undo your own wrongs?
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>>>I'd rather believe in the golden rule than in the "might makes right".
>>
>>Those are not the only two options. The golden rule sounds great but it is bumper sticker morality. If I were to try to kill someone's friend, I would want them to not stop me. Does that mean if they try to kill my friend I should not stop them?
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>You may try to reduce it to a bumper sticker soundbite, but it won't go away from the foundations of Judeo-Christian culture.

But it will continue as a platitude rather than a methology. The problem in if someone is doing something that you believe must be stopped you cannot simply say "Well, I wouldn't want *him* to stop *me* so I will do unto him as I would have him do unto me. It is a moral cop out.

>
>And you've asked your question the wrong way. It's "If I were to try to kill someone's friend, I should expect to be killed myself". Once you accept that, it's easier to deal with the rest.
>

If you accept that, then you can easily see that if someone were to try to kill your friend he should expect to be killed.


>>I think it would have been a splendid idea. Trotsky would have liked it. It may have prevented the crimes against the kulaks. The monster Yagoda was Stalin's creature, as was Beria. The world would unquestionably have been a better place with Stalin's piece removed from the board.
>>
>>And a socialist Germany would have been much less militaristic and quite possibly a model for how a society very good at organizing things could have applied that to socialism. Sweden on steroids.
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>And don't forget that at the time the main socialist thinkers were either Germans, or between Germany, Britain, France and Switzerland. With all those brains in place, they had a good chance of creating a version of it which would actually work - provided that they wouldn't have to become yet another militaristic endeavor under siege mentality, like USSR had (which brought Stalin up in the ranks in the first place).
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>>Yeah, killing Stalin would have been a very very good thing. Do you think otherwise? Or do you think it would have made no difference and we would have had the same outcome because of Historical Forces or some drivel about The Masses ?
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>I'd actually go a few years back and simply leave early USSR alone - no intervention, no reason for the guys who knew nothing but fight to get on top. The nature of the system may have been closer to what the idea advertised. There wouldn't be as much bloodshed, and the need for military types wouldn't be decisive - so Stalin may never have reached Moscow, he may have stayed as a local apparatchik somewhere in the province.

There were a whole lot of pretty ideological Communists who really did believe in something, who knows what they might have accomplished. But it wasn't the intervention that derailed that, but Lenin who had his own ideas about power. And the fact that so many of the Whites were scum didn't help. Russia was a prisoner of its history, so I guess I can see why the Marxist view of historical masses and helpless humans caught on.

>>>One's personal attitudes are a matter of one's free will. Believe me, there are several brands of Serbian culture that I seriously dislike ;). This was about relations between countries, don't apply toothpaste on a carwash brush.
>>
>>That last phrase loses something in translation <g>
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>Wasn't translated - was just looking for a good comparison to show how far did you miss the point.
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>> Dealing with other 'nations' often means dealing with other 'cultures'. Actually quite relevant if often ignored.
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>Ah, that - that's a different question, it's the "how". The "what" was "all countries treated equally". Their cultures, at that, may require some adjustment - that's how it's done, that's diplomacy. You know whom not to offer pork and stuff like that. Again, there's always a common language, or else international banking wouldn't exist.


And American bankers aren't the only team in the big leagues. The common language that drives international banking is money. That is one of the fiew shared cultural values.

But I mean cultural phenomena like tribalism, xenophobia, liberal guilt etc. Dealing with other cultures is more than not offending taboos and more about understanding where basic assumptions and goals are not shared. Multiculturalism, for example, is a tough sell to people whose lives and history have been centered around ethnic purity. Sometimes the lions do not want to lie down with the lambs, they want to eat them. And liberal guilt, while manipulated skillfully by non-Western cultures, causes a great deal of snickering.

The age of the Useful Idiot is not dead.

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>>You can acknowledge that someone is the head of state without 'taking them seriously'. And you can take someone seriously even if they are thug or a buffoon, simply because they may be a dangerous thug or buffoon. And sometimes 'taking them seriously' means trying to do them harm as soon as possible. There was a time when no one took that silly little man with the Charlie Chaplin mustache seriously.
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>By Internet rules, you lost. You brought Hitler into dispute, twice.

<g> At least it was not to compare a current day politician with him because he voted against an increase of funding for some feel-good program <s>

>
>Or do you mean that we should watch for a silly illiterate guy with a fake Texan attitude?

Yeah, Bush - Hitler . No doubt. Spot on. Is Perry writing your material is or that straight from Daily Kos

>
>>I think one should distinguish between foreign policy in a bipolar ( so apt ) world and foreign policy since the Cold War. I saw a lot of the bipolar stuff up close and I also got a good look at what was ready to fill the vacuum anywhere we didn't want to play. Since 1990, I'd say thinking changed a great deal - or at least did until 911. It is a very different game now from the one that was played in 50s - 80s.
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>So it is. BTW, what was the excuse for keeping NATO?

I kind of like the idea that was floated to ask Russia to join before it was discouraged by Russia's former allies.

A nice club for people who at least declare themselves to share some common values (as opposed to the UN) with a little muscle behind it (as opposed to the UN) and something to make the Czechs and Poles and Hungarians etc feel like they won a little security even though there is not much chance the bear with try to eat them again. Makes more sense than the UN in any case. But then, so does the Rotary Club.

And at least there Turkey gets some of the respect it deserves. (sorry, that was a point of personal privilege <s>)