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Many people give a shit, but it's not straightforward to replace a dictator with something better ... Witness every war since WWII

• baybal2 5y ago
  It is straightforward, and US did it in 1945. It is very straightforward. Very straightforward.
  • selimthegrim 5y ago
    They seem to have lost their mojo in 2003.
  • PeterisP 5y ago
    1945 is probably a good counterexample. If Hitler had kept his regime and genocide locally and not invaded neighbours, there would be no WW2, everybody would let him do that. Just like in Cambodia, or Rwanda, or North Korea, or many, many other examples - as a rule, the world does not intervene with violent regime change just because a regime is abusing their people. Like, nobody in power batted an eye when Saddam gassed Kurds in his territory, intervention happened only when he invaded Kuwait. I'm not even sure if I have seen a single exception in 20th-21st century history; it feels like humanitarian aspects have been only used as a pretext or justification if there were other politic/economic reasons that mattered more than that.
    • konart 5y ago
      I think he was talking about Japan rather than Germany.
    • whimsicalism 5y ago
      Libya? Syria? Afghanistan, arguably? Vietnam? Those are really just off the top of my head.
      • PeterisP 5y ago
        What about Libya, Syria, etc? IMHO none of these are examples where the world intervened with violent regime change just because a regime was abusing their people. Libya 2011 was a civil war/revolution, the "boots on the ground" were locals, western nations weren't willing to risk their own soldiers in an actual intervention and it's highly debatable whether the civilian abuse was ever a reason for the western support (aerial and otherwise), IMHO it was essentially about oil. Syria is again a good counterexample - Assad's totalitarian suppression of human rights and torture of opposition was notorious and one of the triggers for the uprising in 2011, but noone considered an intervention before 2011 or at that time for these reasons - Assad's regime is a clear demonstration that no, the world is not going to intervene just because your police is e.g. literally pulling fingernails off highschoolers who have been reported as criticizing the regime. The west was ready to intervene only a few years later in 2014, when the civil war had already raged for years and again it seems to have been done for entirely different reasons e.g. Islamic State, geopolitical tug-of-war with Russia and, again, oil - those things matter for likelihood of intervention, unlike just abusing your civilians. Afghanistan and Vietnam are obviously irrelevant, IMHO noone is seriously asserting that preventing regime atrocities against their own people was the main driver for these wars, other reasons were clearly dominant there. So in my view all those are just examples that the world is not going to do anything serious just because a dictator is murdering or torturing internal opposition. They may invade for various other reasons, and they may opportunistically support one side or the other once some conflict or revolt is already happening (war doesn't seem as horrible if it's all done by someone else's people fighting and suffering), but as long as the totalitarian state is in control, nobody is going to come and bust the oppressed out of their prisons just to help them.
        • whimsicalism 5y ago
          Boots on the ground is an incredibly narrow interpretation of what constitutes intervention, especially with modern warfare tactics that rely on local organizing, arms supply, air support and very few actual boots on the ground. If your original comment had been "rarely does the int'l community put boots on the ground for solely humanitarian reasons", I think it would have been more defensible. I don't think the evidence is there to support that Libya was "essentially about oil." There is evidence for that possibly being a major motivation for France, but that was only one of multiple large players in the intervention. Libya was invaded with UN security council authorization pretty explicitly focused on humanitarian concerns. Your timeline on Syria is wrong. Sure, much more extensive intervention began against ISIL in 2014, but there was support for early rebel forces in Syria starting in 2012.
• stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Yeah basically those wars have shown that unless the locals want democracy and you are willing to suppress all rebellion with an iron fist (like USA in Japan) then as soon as you leave, if you even win, it will go back to the way it was before just under a new dictator. It just seems like some societies just don't care if they're run by a dictator. Sure some will rise up but it's usually no more than a few percent.
  • whimsicalism 5y ago
    Perhaps there are also issues with the style of democracies that the US installs that people in different regions don't like.