Saddam Execution Thread

[Parihaka]

Originally Posted by Garry

Hi Parihaka, I may see things a bit more cinical.... I am not proud of being cynical.... would change my view to optimism once I see ground for that.

Lol, I must have been a bit grumpy when I typed that, my apologies

As for three countries where brutal dictatorships weren't required, and different ethnic/cultural groups learned or are learning to get along.

Northern Ireland
Timor Leste
Solomon Islands
Lebanon (yes Lebanon!)
New Zealand
India

[Garry]

Originally Posted by Ray

One cannot look at Iraq in isolation.

The fate of Iraq hinges upon the political and social interplay in the Middle East and the Great Game that is on at present in that area!

If Iran collapses, then Russia's age old dream of getting a warm water port off the Arabian Sea/ Indian Ocean will come true.

Hardly a comfortable feeling!

Only when the CAR is safely in the US bag, can one think of destabilising Iran in addition to the chaos prevalent in Iraq!

In this connection, the US interest in having a Kurdistan (only in Iraq) is of import since a landlocked Kurdistan with hostile neighbours will totally be propped by the US. It will be the buffer between Russian interest in Iraq and an access to the warm waters!

Hi Ray, Russians are not capable to expand nowadays.... maybe next generation? The current generation is too conserned with consumption... nobody will fight for empire.... in a way... most of the emperial spirit for fight is dead. It reminds me Italian emperial ambitions in WW2.... population liked emperial talks but nobody was prepared to go and fight

[Garry]

Originally Posted by Parihaka

Lol, I must have been a bit grumpy when I typed that, my apologies

As for three countries where brutal dictatorships weren't required, and different ethnic/cultural groups learned or are learning to get along.

Northern Ireland
Timor Leste
Solomon Islands
Lebanon (yes Lebanon!)
New Zealand
India

Well, I would take only India out of this list. And this example is really supporting your point.... mostly due to the personality of Gandhi and his increadible influence on people.

Some of others I don't know (New Zealand, Solomon Islands). Timor Leste was not a civil war... it was attack of Central Government on the Christian part of the island using the 4% muslim minority. Once Central Government was forced out there was not fuel for the war....

Lebanon!?!?!? Syria won that war.... and it was governing that country!!! I was in Lebanon many times in mid 1990-es and I can say clearly! Syria laid down all the forces which opposed them! However.... not decisivelly

[Swift Sword]

Saddam Hussein is not dead.

We saw him on Barry Street in Chicago about noon on Saturday.

Regards,

William

[entropy]

Was my Chuck Norris costume that bad?

[Garry]

This is very interesting article on Democracy and Capitalism.... the views are changing... reality is changing unsupported ideas

An Unexpected Odd Couple: Free Markets and Freedom
By PATRICIA COHEN
1169 words
14 June 2007
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
4
English
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.

When President Bush declared last week that political openness naturally accompanied economic openness, his counterparts in Beijing and Moscow were not the only ones to object. Liberal and conservative intellectuals, even once ardent supporters, have backed away from the century-old theory that democracy and capitalism, like Paris Hilton and paparazzi, need each other to survive.

From China, where astounding economic growth persists despite Communist Party rule, to Russia, where President Vladimir V. Putin has squelched opposition, to Venezuela, where dissent is silenced, developments around the world have been tearing jawbreaker-size holes in what has been a remarkably powerful idea, not only in academic circles but also in both Republican and Democratic administrations -- that capitalism and democracy are two sides of a coin.

''People, including myself, still have reasons to think it will eventually happen,'' Francis Fukuyama, a political economist at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said of China's evolution to democracy. ''But the time frame has to be a lot longer.'' At least in the next couple of decades, he said, it is likely that ''the authoritarian system will keep going and get stronger.''

Mr. Fukuyama, perhaps more than anyone else, has been associated with the idea that capitalism and democracy are inextricably linked. In his famous essay, ''The End of History,'' written in 1989 as the Soviet Union was in decline, he declared that all nations would ultimately develop into Western-style liberal democracies.

''There was great hope in the early 1990s,'' said Michael Mandelbaum, the author of the forthcoming book ''Democracy's Good Name: The Rise and Risks of the World's Most Popular Form of Government.'' The belief was that rising incomes would create a middle class that would agitate for personal liberty and political power. The tipping point seemed to occur when per capita income reached somewhere between $6,000 and $8,000. True, there were exceptions like tiny Singapore with its growing wealth and one-party state, but they were often dismissed as too small or transitional to really put a dent in the theory.

Yet, as the free market and autocrats gained power in the Caucasus, Central Asia, Latin America and Russia, the initial optimism about democracy's sure-footed march faltered. Some scholars pointed out that the American experience, where democracy and capitalism arose at the same time, was not so much a model for the rest of the world as an anomaly. ''Capitalism came before democracy essentially everywhere, except in this country, where they started at the same time,'' said Bruce R. Scott, an economist at Harvard Business School who is finishing a book titled ''Capitalism, Democracy and Development.''

''In the rest of the world, it took 100, 200, 300 years before they got to where they could manage a democracy,'' Mr. Scott said. A big mistake, he said, was assuming that ''all you had to have was a constitution and an election and you had a democracy; that was really stupid.''

Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate now at Columbia University, agrees that one of the biggest changes since the early 1990s is an appreciation of the complexity and limits of democracy.

As more fledgling democracies fail, various theories have surfaced to explain the appearance of democracy and elections without real freedom. Fareed Zakaria, a columnist and author of a book on the development of democracy, suggested that some countries -- Singapore, Peru and Russia, for example -- went through a stage of ''illiberal democracy,'' where there was robust economic growth but few political liberties like a free press, the rule of law and personal liberty until liberal habits and institutions had a chance to develop.

Then, just after the start of the Iraq war, ''There was a miniburst of optimism'' that capitalism was leading to democracy after all, Mr. Mandelbaum said, with three popular uprisings in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan and elections in Gaza, Lebanon and Egypt in 2005. The burst quickly fizzled though, when the democratic ''revolutions'' proved short-lived and prone to violence and corruption. Now some scholars argue that a free market can even end up undermining democracy. ''Capitalism doesn't necessarily lead toward democracy at all,'' Mr. Scott said. ''The one thing that you can say is that capitalism is going to relentlessly produce inequality of income, and eventually that is going to become incompatible with democracy.'' That is where political leadership and institutions come in.

Another problem, said Lord Dahrendorf, a research professor at the Social Science Research Center Berlin, is that when democracy fails to deliver the economic goods, people begin to doubt its value. ''Few things seem more difficult and yet few things are more important for sustainable liberty,'' he wrote recently, ''than to separate capitalism and democracy in people's minds.'' Otherwise, instead of mutually reinforcing each other, the two spiral into disenchantment.

Even if capitalism does not assure democracy's existence, many economists and political scientists say it creates a hospitable atmosphere and helps democratic systems withstand turmoil. Nor should we forget, Mr. Stiglitz counsels, that ''the movement from closed to open society is a very big change.'' To compete economically, a nation has to be plugged into the global information network, which exposes its citizens to other political systems and cultures. Reinforcing that trend, Mr. Mandelbaum said, is that the ''habits and values of a market economy, when transferred to the political sphere, make for a democracy.''

But China, he acknowledges, is ''the big enchilada, the big test.'' Even with its growing middle class, it still has a billion poor people. Pressure for democracy will increase, but so will push back from China's leaders. So far they have been successful. ''The Chinese government is pretty good at buying off intellectuals and the middle class who fear disorder much more than they want political participation,'' Mr. Fukuyama said.

He added that he would not be surprised if China and even Russia were to come up with a ''new type of authoritarian ideology that tries to justify'' their non-Western systems. He has already heard the outlines of such arguments -- which echo the ''Asian values'' idea of non-Western cultural norms that lead to different development paths -- from Chinese intellectuals and Russian policy makers.

Where the theorizing spills out of the classroom, though, is around the question of what can be done to influence the process. This is where stark differences appear, not between liberals and conservatives, but between the professors and policy makers. As Mr. Fukuyama said, one point on which he has differed from neoconservatives in the Bush administration is that, ''I think, in general, the United States can't do very much.''

[tankie]

Originally Posted by Swift Sword

Saddam Hussein is not dead.

We saw him on Barry Street in Chicago about noon on Saturday.

Regards,

William

Hanging around with Elvis was he