Maritime Morning - Andrew Krystal

General George C. Marshall understood. When you win a war, you must back it up with moral authority. Hence both the Marshall plan for post war Germany and Europe, and post war Japanese reconstruction. It is also very good for creating American markets. Germany and Japan are models of how to win, and win the peace. Unfortunately, there are not enough examples like them. We did do well in Kosovo and the former Yugoslavia too, I might add.

A friend of mine at the New York Times wrote an article in Sunday’s paper establishing that the Bush administration bailed on Afghanistan after the conquest; resources were diverted to Iraq instead. Even in Iraq, where the State Department was shut out and the Pentagon ran the show post-conquest, there was precious little help for the people. No one cared.

They care now though. Too late. Abused children retaliate. That’s what we are seeing now in Iraq.

After the first Gulf war, Saddam had the water running again pretty quickly. It is still, to this day, down in Iraq (and you thought Nova Scotia Power was bad!). It is common knowledge that from infant mortality to disease, the people in Iraq were better off with Saddam. The tribal, fractured, American puppet government there now is incompetent and lacks the confidence of the people.

One of the reasons America let Saddam keep the Kurds down after the no-fly zones were established was to placate Turkey, a country that happens to have a whole bunch of Kurds straddling their border too;  the Kurds want their own state and want to re-draw national boundaries. In southern Iraq, Saddam was allowed to put down a Shiite rebellion under America’s watchful gaze, all in the name of state security, control, and the status quo.

Control and order.

Many China watchers have said to me that the only reason nationalism (China has a huge historical memory and harbours many grievances against the West) has not run amok in that country is due to the repressive regime of the Chinese Communist leaders — they kept the students at bay in 1989 and have been going strong ever since.

Democracy, and the Chinese nationalism it will unleash, is bad for business according to the Maoist/Marxist, Chinese oligarchial leadership who are milking their capitalist engine — despite the idelogical contradiction.

Let me repeat, China: a communist ideology, a dictatorship, a capitalist engine. If that country isn’t due for a colonic  I don’t know what is. But what makes it work is one thing — government control. The same thing is needed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is common knowledge that America prefers an acquiescent dictatorship to a dissenting democracy. The U.S. has propped up more dictators than any country on earth, more than England in its’ hey day. Simply put, democracy is a Western notion that doesn’t take hold in many other places. It almost didn’t here in the West during the 1930’s.

Without the dictatorship in Pakistan, the whole world would be in flames. President Musharraf sits upon a fundamentalist powder keg with nuclear weapons. And his regime is shaky.

Our notions of Western universalism and triumphalsim is absolute bullshit.

You know why Clinton let the 1994 genocide happen in Rwanda but stopped the killing Bosnia? Because we are European, that’s why. We are not anti-African. If the genocide happened again in Cambodia or Indonesia (and it did) our response would be the same. What’s wrong with that? Was Asia or Africa here to help the settlers when we dug the place out? Did they intervene to prevent the Spanish destruction of the Incas, and Aztecs? Or our destruction and decimation of Indians? Was the colonization of North America conducted under the rubric of democracy? Get real. Democracy for us maybe, but not the Indians.

Democracy is a process, constitutional Liberalism a goal; the final act of black emancipation in America was dictated to the south by the executive branch of the U.S. government under Kennedy and Johnson, against the “democratic” wishes of the south.

Democracy is not always the answer, nor is it what we always mean when we use the word.

“Our way” has much blood on its hands too. At least dictatorships are honest.

They may not even want us.