badgenome said:
And here I thought you were arguing that they weren't stupid. You have to understand that forty years ago we were still in the Cold War era . The neoconservative priority was to oppose the USSR at every turn and not necessarily to promote democracy. After the Cold War, the neocons fell prey to inevitablist delusions that liberal democracy had won the day and was the answer to everything. See: Fukuyama's End of History. |
I'd argue that Fukuyama is right in a broad-strokes sense, but the wrong step the American neo-cons took with it was in assuming this sort of thing could be rushed (really, the same mistake was made by Socialism and Communism. Societies less prepared for a stable sharing of wealth are just going to see class-genocide and looting). Countries that are not ready for democracy have a high probability of just melting down when democracy is thrust upon them from the outside.
Liberalization worked (to a degree) in Eastern Europe because the Communists had spent 40 to 70 years educating their people and building all sorts of infrastructure, and the eastern-european countries were mostly homogenous nation-states that would not have a lot of internal ethnic strife (or, like the Soviet Union, could be divided easily into sorta-homogenous zones).
The middle east, both far less developed and with a careless geography that cared more about the balance of power than who actually wanted to live in which country, could not have the same notions applied to it.
Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.
