From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sat Feb 22 2003 - 14:32:01 MST
Max Plumm, who should be awarded a professorship of history,
writes a very nice piece on the intricacies of Middle Eastern
politics 1950-1980, at the height of the Cold War.
http://www.extropy.org/exi-lists/extropians/0302/3337.html
Max writes
> Having addressed the hyperbole on both sides, I would like now to address my main concern with Sean's post. As I commented to Mez, I cannot abide judgments passed on US foreign policy that make it appear these decisions were being made in a vacuum. To "describe" the US-Iranian relationship during the Cold War without once mentioning the Soviet Union, as Sean does, is to simply ignore reality.
<
This is an absolutely crucial element in attempting to
understand how many Western governments during this
period appeared friendly to some despotic tyrants,
such as Marcos, Franco, or Pinochet. It was, as I
said in another post, very probably a choice between
the lesser of two evils. For what other reason would,
for example, an American administration endanger its
reputation and chances for re-election by allying itself
with a repressive regime? The leftists would have you
think so just because they're purely wicked.
That being said, Max was extremely circumspect in his
post acknowledging the danger of letting the notion of
"the lesser of two evils" cause us to be blind to the
real moral failings of oppression everywhere; he did
this by frankly acknowledging the evils of, for example,
the Shah's regime.
> Needless to say, the track record of the Soviet Union in spreading democracy to its dependents during the Cold War was a decidedly bad one. Additionally, even if one wishes to take the highly unlikely position that Iran would've somehow remained above influence, democracies did not exactly "pop up out of nowhere" in the third world of the 1950's and '60's. Those that somehow did found themselves quickly ousted by military coup d'etat.
<
The sad worry is that in some nations at some times, representative
democracy is probably impossible, and certainly impossible in the
instant. This is an error made over and over again, and often by
people on this list too. They still have in their minds the notion
that people far different from them, with deep traditions and quite
separate cultures, can simply adopt democracy overnight if only all
the bad people would get out of the way. It's quite naive.
Now, that being said, I am still expecting that the Bush administration,
or the government of any other western power, will place what is good
for their own citizens above what is good for those in other countries.
This is necessary if they want to be re-elected. Of course, they are
cognizant that the people themselves in western democracies do care
more than a whit about conditions in other nations. This is exactly
why the Western countries are so relatively benevolent, despite their
power.
One thus hopes that genuine concern for the benefit of the common
people in faraway places does influence the thinking of western
governments. Hopefully they see it, correctly, as win-win: the
freer the peoples all around the world, the better for us too.
Lee
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