Dwayne wrote:
> Like a FischerSpooner performance this looks good and
> sounds good.
>
> Ah, but is it good? Does the idea stand up to
> scrutiny?
>
> We can perform a sort of experiment. Let's take the
> underlying, Pontius Pilate-esque washed hands
> assumption - Saddam was a bad man and didn't need any
> help from the US to be bad, so maybe immoral foreign
> policy was not the root cause of woe - and plug and
> play it into another scenario.
I was discussing the assignation of causal--not moral--responsibility (though of course moral responsibility is linked to causal responsibility). I think my original claim is sound: even in the absence of US support, Iraq under Saddam would’ve been (by the standards of the region) a relatively awful place to reside.
Shane wrote:
> No, "we" don't.
>
> -- Shane
Beware the royal we.
Thiago wrote:
> That's an odd way to go into this particular problem. Obviously,
> the Burmese junta isn't representative of the Burmese. But neither > is
England - or the barely-elected US administration -
> representative of the Burmese. So at a stretch, you could say that > the
General Assembly is not less democratic than the Security
> Council. That leaves a lot to be desired as an argument against the >
reforms Yoshie suggests.
>
> As for the population sizes, should that be the only consideration?
> One billion wills crammed into one vote is less democracy per vote
> than a hundred thousand wills into one vote - and how is this
>problem, which is one of imperfect representation, solved by having > the
resulting vote weighed more heavily?
>
>From another perspective, someone could argue that tyrannical
> regimes such as Burma - or for that matter the USSR back in the day > -
ought to be given equal footing with democracies given (a) the
> absence of acceptable transnational criteria of democracy (b) the
> fact someone has to make decisions for the populations of these
> countries until they become democracies and (c) there is no reason > to
think the Western powers have the interests of these populations > at
heart, save the self-serving statements of Western leaders.
Excellent points which provide the basis for substantive future discussion (unfortunately, I won’t have regular internet access for a week, so I won’t be able to participate in that discussion for a while). To anyone interested in these issues, I recommend Peter Singer’s recently published _One World: The Ethics of Globalization_.
Willy wrote:
> As I recall, Saddam was very much under the impression
> that his war against Iran was a war against Islamic
> fundamentalism (now known as Islamofascism, thanks to
> Dr. Hitchens). Both the U.S. and Arab elites certainly
> did not disabuse him of this notion. Maybe in this
> limited regard, Luke is correct, though there's slim
> indication that I can see that an Islamofascist regime
> or even an Islamic regime would have taken root in
> Iraq.
Sorry about that. I did oversimplify the roots of US support for Saddam (which included, to a much smaller extent than I suggested, the belief that Iranian theocracy was a greater threat). From what I’ve read, it seems that the US played _both_ sides of the Iraq-Iran conflict because of a perceived interest in preventing either side from becoming a regional power.
Charles wrote:
> So are u what ? Claiming to be in favor of real UN democracy ?
Yeah, I noticed how clumsy my construction was when I received my own message. Whoops.
> So, the U.S. government ( and French, and British..) ,as a
> dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, wouldn't be represented.
Well, unlike Justin (and possibly unlike Mill), the fact that people often don’t vote their interests doesn’t strike me as evidence that they’re not voting in a real democracy?it strikes me as evidence that even real democracy, though almost always better than the alternatives, often leaves much to be desired.
-- Luke