So in your view certain nations are better than other nations and therefore they get to decide who gets what?
Free nations are legitimate. Dictatorships are not. They are just large scale hostage situations, ethically.
Insofar as things like the UN exist, it's free nations trying to make peace by bundling in dictatorships to rules.
That argument quite quickly leads back to colonialism.
I have no problem, in theory, with invading and ending dictatorships.
Do you?
We don't, usually, for practical reasons. But ethically we have every right to do so, just as the police have the "right" to end any hostage situation.
Free people always have the right to free non-free people. My desire to be free and your desire to lord over me are not two equally arbitrary, and therefore equally valid, viewpoints.
Also, which countries get to decide. European countries are also democracies. Which area's of the world can we threaten with conventional attacks if we find them a threat?
List them and we can discuss each.
And russia, what area's do they get to claim as their own?
We've seen what Russia did in the past with Germany. How well did that work out?
And if you view Russia as a paragon of freedom, were the Russian quasi-nationals in the other areas suffering from a lack of freedom?
You seem to claim that the US somehow will only make a morally acceptable choice when it comes to deciding who to back and who to attack.
Yet history seems to tell otherwise.
As mentioned above re: practicalities, the
wisdom of individual decisions is a separate issue.
The US had no problems being close allies with outright fascist spain agains communism.
I do not defend this. I note these things were in a context of communism rising, something that, on retrospect, was not quite the threat people thought it was. (This was before much of the famed "hundreds of century-long experiments involving billions of test subjects" had come close to completing.)
Saudi Arabia is a theocratich monarchy where even the limited democracy present in Iran is not allowed and its an open secret that the country funds large amounts of terrorist organizations. And even supplies the terrorsists themselves, yet its considered a good ally of the US.
I do not defend this. In the larger picture, "invade-and-free" would be a difficult challenge, would it not? Yet they will continue to sell their oil.
And, just like the drug violence in northern Mexico, where the Mexican government is essentially a failed state (i.e. cannot impose its will there, leaving lawlessness of warlords) so, too, are many dictatorships of the mid east such a "prize" to be dictator of due to oil money.
How are many of the non-oil dictatorships in Africa doing without us caring? No better? Just as bad?
Go figure. Which is worse for the locals: One dictator who owns the oil in a country, or a bunch of warlords ala "blood diamonds"?
Neither are free. Neither are good.
Iraq was a good ally of the US when it invaded Iran without provocation and the US never complained about Saddam while he did what he was told.
So no, I do not consider the US to be all that much more moral in international politics.
Don't get me wrong, I don't condemn their actions. I live in europe and its as much in my best interest as yours to keep europe and the US on top of the world so we can live our lives of luxury. But at least I'm honest enough to accept that our actions in the international field are neither truly fair nor moral nor 'right'. They are pragmatic with the intent to keep us as comfortable as possible.
Its the 'we're a democracy, so everything we do is good' type hypocrasy that just annoys me.
I agree with this -- my point was that only free countries have the ethical right to do something about non-free countries. Not that
what they did was necessarily ethical.
