Beet
Atlas Star
Posts: 29,002
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« on: June 05, 2005, 01:05:09 AM » |
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« edited: June 05, 2005, 01:08:34 AM by thefactor »
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This is exactly why Kerry did not win the first debate as badly as everyone was saying he did. The debate was his last chance to offer an alternative idealism to the nation, instead what he offered was "better management".
That night, he lost his last chance to offer a vision, in exchange for winning some tactical, rhetorical points against Bush and positive press coverage. The loss was thus bigger than the gain.
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What will never be said in the media can only be said on the internet. Which is why I will say it here. Bush's foreign policy has yet to yield a single complete democracy. Iraq is incomplete because the nation does not yet have sovereignty-- and will not likely have such for decades. The shell administration seen in Iraq today has come at the cost of between 21,940 and 100,000 innocent lives and growing. Afghanistan is incomplete because elections for national leader have not been held in Afghanistan. Indeed, there is no Afghani national leader of Afghanistan. Neither of these nations are making progress.
Egypt, which the article talks about, is not a democracy and not likely to become one in the near future. Various countries in the Middle East, including Kuwait and Lebanon, had been heading towards greater democratic representation at the end of the 1990s and have recently made strides in the continuation of that trend. Yet, with the relative populations of nations considered, the spread of democracy has slowed, not accelerated, in the past 5 years.
Compare, for example, the spread of democracy in the years 1985-1995. Again, I could pick and choose like a true propagandist, but let us look at some maps (land can't hide):
Since 1997, what new democracies have been fully created? Some of these countries, like the Ukraine, have recently had election fraud overturned. Yet these are not instances of entirely created new democracies from the state of autocracy. In answer to the question, one major new democracy, Indonesia, came into being in this period, specifically, in 1998. After more than three decades, Indonesia's dictator Suharto fell from power and the country of 220 million people now has free, democratic elections. This all of this happened before the year 2000.
Besides that, the map does not look substantively better today than in 1997-- actually it looks worse. Russia, once a secure democracy as Ukraine is today, is now slipping back into a semi-autocratic democracy as Ukraine was before 2004. Pakistan, which was a democracy in 1997, is no longer a democracy (this happened in 1999, but was reinforced in 2002). These two nations comprise 300 million people. The bottom line: Since 2000, the pace of democratization has slowed or even reversed, not accelerated.
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