3 ms·

I'm sympathetic to your annoyance at reflexive anti-Americanism. We sure have had a bad string of making the same mistakes though over the past twenty years.

I'm sympathetic to your annoyance at reflexive anti-Americanism. We sure have had a bad string of making the same mistakes though over the past twenty years. The pattern is: There is a dictator that is oppressing his people, we feel bad about it and want them to be able to have democracy. We overthrow the dictator, and then things get complicated and we walk away, leaving the place in civil war and ruin. Often the problem is that the only reason it's a country at all is that some guy in London drew a line on a map a couple of hundred years ago, and the borders do not reflect ethnic or religious loyalties. In this post colonial situation, often the only thing holding the country together was the violence of the dictator. We then swoop in with fighter jets and maybe even ground troops, maybe stick around a while to run a few elections, but generally without the understanding of what's left of the power structure in the country. This is precisely what happened in Libya, and after Iraq and Afghanistan it's shameful that we just continue to do the same thing. Bomb Gaddafi and let the chips fall where they may, which turns out to be years long civil war. If you want to look for a relatively successful model of U.S. intervention, it's what we did in Yugoslavia. Just recognize that the country doesn't have enough holding it together to be a functioning democracy, break it up along ethnic lines, institute democracy in the statelets, and then let them all join the EU when they're ready.

deogeo 7y ago
> the borders do not reflect ethnic or religious loyalties. Wouldn't the diversity give them strength?
- dmix 7y ago
  Plenty of borders in Europe, Asia, and even Africa have mixed nationality and religions too and there isn’t constant violence and repression by the biggest tribe. There’s far more positive examples than not around the globe. I’m actually in favour in smaller nation states and redrawing lines as a solution to the failures of centralized mega states and old world borders, such as lack of representation and cultural differences which cause policy conflicts (the smaller stuff, not just violence which is atypical in most places). Plus smaller states = way more experimentation, which the US states were supposed to be with Federalism but has had that slowly taken away. But that’s another story which doesn’t help explain the contradictions of this common explanation used selectively in Africa.
  - cameldrv 7y ago
    There are a number of stable prosperous multiethnic states. In the specific examples of Iraq, Syria, and Libya though, part of the specific rationale for the U.S. moving in to overthrow the dictator was that the dictator and his ethnic group were oppressing the rest of the country. If democracy is instituted, and the ruling group was a minority, there will be resentment on the side of the majority for past treatment, and resentment on the side of the formerly ruling minority for their diminished status. This has a tendency to boil over into civil war. This is exactly what happened in Yugoslavia, and we solved it by breaking up the country, and it has been fairly peaceful for twenty years. The main place where there are still problems is in Bosnia, and specifically because we left Bosnia together and the Bosnian Serbs want out.

deogeo 7y ago

> the borders do not reflect ethnic or religious loyalties. Wouldn't the diversity give them strength?

dmix 7y ago
Plenty of borders in Europe, Asia, and even Africa have mixed nationality and religions too and there isn’t constant violence and repression by the biggest tribe. There’s far more positive examples than not around the globe. I’m actually in favour in smaller nation states and redrawing lines as a solution to the failures of centralized mega states and old world borders, such as lack of representation and cultural differences which cause policy conflicts (the smaller stuff, not just violence which is atypical in most places). Plus smaller states = way more experimentation, which the US states were supposed to be with Federalism but has had that slowly taken away. But that’s another story which doesn’t help explain the contradictions of this common explanation used selectively in Africa.
- cameldrv 7y ago
  There are a number of stable prosperous multiethnic states. In the specific examples of Iraq, Syria, and Libya though, part of the specific rationale for the U.S. moving in to overthrow the dictator was that the dictator and his ethnic group were oppressing the rest of the country. If democracy is instituted, and the ruling group was a minority, there will be resentment on the side of the majority for past treatment, and resentment on the side of the formerly ruling minority for their diminished status. This has a tendency to boil over into civil war. This is exactly what happened in Yugoslavia, and we solved it by breaking up the country, and it has been fairly peaceful for twenty years. The main place where there are still problems is in Bosnia, and specifically because we left Bosnia together and the Bosnian Serbs want out.