Being In Bed With And Trying To Liberate The Mid East.
Come gather round people wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth saving
Then you'd better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone-Bob Dylan, Times They Are A-Changing
Link
Can you save the world from itself?
The reason why I ask is it seems that the Bush adminstration wants to try. Or, at the very least, liberate everyone from their oppressors. The thing about that is that many of the countries in the Middle East are theocracies and dictatorships, even our allies, and the ones that are democracies seemed to be forced onces at best. While the United States can lead well by example and promote order to each of these countries, we can't very well tell them what to do, can we?
Can we? I'll tell you how I feel about all this and you'll be free to disagree with me if you'd like. It sounds like the adminstration is writing themselves a 'blank check' to possibly restrain other countries in the name in the War Against Terror if the adminstration deems it necessary. The thing that makes me vaguely queasy about all this is that these countries might be creating terrorists with their oppressive regimes or using terrorists to support their goals locally and globally. At the very least, they may be creating terrorists by people who disagree with their regimes. So by inviting these countries to sit down and do business with us with their human rights violations, water is appearing in the flood gate and filling up the dam, little by little, and our efforts seem to do nothing more then stick fingers in the holes.
We need to make sure that our allies are moving toward desirable ends. The way we do this is leading by example by eliminating as many of these violations we find among ourselves, and take an advocacy point of view. We need to decry what abuses we find. We need to expose these things like we should be exposing terrorism, by researching the problem from within and then acting swiftly, but with the force of a chisel, not a sledgehammer. We walk a tightrope and the waters are rising.
Nervous About Sleeping With the Enemy, the wolf dragon/AWM,
Sol