> Brad DeLong:
>> Is Castro a "legitimate" ruler? If Mexico and Costa Rica decided that
>> the days of dictators were over in Cuba, would you oppose them?
Is Bush a legitimate ruler? If Brazil, Costa Rica and a token pacific nation, say Kiribati, decided to get rid of him, would you oppose them?
Ways in which Bush may fail to be a legitimate ruler: he was elected in dubious circumstances, perhaps not elected at all; the US electoral college system is a weird relic that clearly fails 20th century standards of democratic enfranchisement; you guys still don't have preference allocation or proportional representation; so is the idea of an unelected executive; his regime is connected to terror, and in fact appointed arch terrorist Negroponte to the UN; the US harbours terrorists, including Otto Reich and even Kissinger, who had a hand in killing about a kiloWTC worth of S.E. Asians; it refuses to abide by extradition requests for such criminals as the heads of Union Carbide; it is in possession of massive amounts of WMDs and has repeatedly signalled that it will not abide by the international law governing their disposal and use; it has invaded a country more or less every second year for the last twenty five; it finances religious fundamentalists in Israel; it torpedoes international institutions at every opportunity, and to top a very partial list of grievances, the US is a clear and present danger to the world's environment. These are some of the reasons why people such as myself find your insistence on legitimacy rather implausible. If you really cared about it, you would be trying to blow up the white house (which is what 'intervention' US-style ultimately boils down to.)
Thiago Oppermann