> We could influence things one way or the other, but we didn't have a liberal democracy wand that would magically transform a country's political culture. We t

> We could influence things one way or the other, but we didn't have a liberal democracy wand that would magically transform a country's political culture. We tried that in Iraq and it was a failure. I'm not disputing that (well, unless you mean that the main point of the Iraq war was to bring Coca-Cola and democracy to the oppressed Iraqi masses). It's just that IMHO, most of each block's policy was about protecting their own political and economic interests, camouflaging such unpalatable truths under the guise of "freeing people from oppression". You certainly had people who believed in what they were doing, but IMHO, for most of the people pulling the levers, that was about knowing on which side the bread was buttered. > You can draw analogies to the Spanish Civil War. Both sides sucked. Orwell went to fight for the Republicans, but came back completely disillusioned because the Republicans were totally dominated by the Soviet Union. He writes about his experiences in Homage to Catalonia, which I strongly recommend. The Nationalists were not good people either, but Spain would have been much worse off if the Republicans won and turned it into a Soviet satellite. It's ironic you write about the Spanish Civil War, considering that the main reason Stalin-backed communists got so much power was that the Republic was entirely dependent on them for weapons, largely in part due to the passive British support for Franco.