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Originally posted by bilmore
That's silly.
I might say "if you don't allow your subjects to take part in the decision-making, and continue to kill them in great numbers, we are going to depose you and your co-thugs, and then step back and let your subjects choose how they want life to be."
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You might say that. But I wasn't responding to what you might say; I was responding to what Spanky actually did say:
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Once we had the bomb and they didn't we should have told Stalin to hold free elections or face annihilation.
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Now, maybe by "annihilation" he meant "we will depose you and your co-thugs," but I doubt it -- the A-bomb was not exactly a surgical nuke that could be used to take out only the Kremlin.
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I can't believe that you think we're forcing Iraqis into something. We stopped the guy beating up the little kid. In doing so, we haven't forced the little kid into anything.
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I don't believe that. We didn't threaten to nuke the country -- again, I was responding to Spanky's point, not yours.
But the "guy beating up the little kid" analogy is more than a little strained. So you cross the street to stop the guy -- any decent person would. But then what? Do you keep the kid in your house, and prevent the guy from getting him back? Do you shoot the guy in the head and tell the kid to elect new parents?
If our primary motivation in going into Iraq had been to spread democracy -- something I think you and I disagree on, but not a discussion I think we need to rehash -- then I would acknowledge that this was a valuable and noble goal.
But I would still view it as a mistake, given the distance between the goal we have accomplished and the costs we have incurred. We had already stopped the guy from beating up the kid -- through no-fly zones and crippling of the military. But we went a whole lot further than that, deciding that we should in fact bring the kid over to our house to live with us, until he could choose new parents, while fighting off his relatives.
Maybe you feel this was worth it -- fine. But you seem not even to acknowledge the cost -- 2000 American lives and counting, how many thousands of innocent Iraqi lives we don't know, etc. And yes, maybe you can justify those deaths because of the benefits a democracy would bring Iraq, if we actually get to see one -- but isn't that simply taking the "the benefit to the many is more important that the costs to the one" view that you claim to hate so much?
