From: Michael Wiik (mwiik@messagenet.com)
Date: Wed Mar 12 2003 - 21:54:35 MST
dehede011@aol.com writes:
> In my experience liberal is a term
> that socialist apply to themselves to disguise who they really are. Are you
> suggesting that the Americans will attempt to turn the Iraqi into a bunch of
> democratic socialists?
Why not? One of the things Thomas Friedman mentioned on the lecture (on
CSPAN) was that Iraq might be the 'arab yugoslavia', in which the
dictatorship is *necessary* to keep the various ethnic groups from
killing each other. I've see mentions of 'supervised labor' for
(otherwise not gainfully employed) youth. There's no way it's gonna be a
democracy right off, as they really want (for some reason) to keep the
country together when it seems it might be better off as three
mini-states. (And a federation is one model that's been discussed). I
can see the government remaining much the same (especially since they're
gonna use the buracracy and army). I think any real democracy would be
far off. Maybe never, as it'd have to be restored here first :-)
Since the country's population is half kids, it seems some sort of soft
revolution might happen when these folks start getting tons of
cellphones and internet access. Might be kind of cool actually, and I'd
tend toward supporting the war if the US had a halfway competent
administration.
15 year olds are idealistic anyways, so why not a few years/decades of
socialism? Along with the 'supervised labor' they could spy on their
parents. Get 'em nicely domesticated it'll take them years to realize
they're getting screwed by the US/UK oil companies now running the place.
-Mike
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