WHO GETS TO REALLY LIVE THE HYPOCRISY OF DEMOCRACY?



Sen. John Mc.CAIN or should I say Mc.CANT recently suggested that pacification of Iraq and the departure of American forces was feasible by 2013. But pacification of Iraq is not how President Bush defines success. The president recently restated his goal: to transform Iraq into democratic-capitalist modernity, much as Germany and Japan had been transformed during the military occupations that followed their defeat in World War II.

However, Iraq is an Arab country, and no Arab country has yet been able to at least even properly consolidate democracy if at all, and that includes Jordan and Lebanon, the two that are most developed. Literacy rates illustrate the difficulty of modernizing Iraq: in 2003/04, 57 percent of women in 15 Arab countries were literate. World Bank data show just 30 percent of Iraqi females as literate in 2003. And of course, democratization in Iraq is vastly complicated by the longstanding hostility between the majority Shiite and the minority Sunni, and between those two Arab sects and the Iraqi Kurds. By contrast, Germany and Japan were highly developed industrial nations with fully integrated and educated populaces. And their governments had both surrendered unconditionally. Our military occupations of three underdeveloped countries in the Caribbean basin in the early decades of the 20th century may have far greater relevance for Iraq. Motivated chiefly by concern over German presence in unstable Caribbean countries at the time of the opening of the Panama Canal, President William Howard Taft ordered the military occupation of Nicaragua, which lasted from 1912 to 1933. Woodrow Wilson followed suit in Haiti (1915-34) and the Dominican Republic (1916-24).

As in Iraq, these interventions combined elements of realpolitik and what Franklin Roosevelt's Latin America expert Sumner Welles subsequently described as the role of the Evangel: to reform the conditions of life and government of the sovereign republics of the American hemisphere; but Mr. Welles concluded with respect to US-imposed democratic reform, "All sense of proportion was lost." The dubiousness of the Bush credo "These values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society" is underscored by the aftermath of those prolonged military occupations such as:

Nicaragua: The US Marines occupied Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933 and attempted to install democratic institutions. But the occupation provoked an insurgency led by Augusto César Sandino, who became a symbol of resistance to US intervention. In step with Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy, the Marines left in 1933. In 1936, Nicaragua's National Guard commander General Anastasio Somoza García initiated a dictatorial dynasty that would last for 43 years. A successful revolution led by the leftist Sandinistas – "children of Sandino"– forced Anastasio Somoza Debayle into exile in 1979, leading to another US military intervention through aid to the contras in the 1980s. Democratic continuity was established in the elections of 1990, but it is fragile and marred by extensive corruption.

Haiti: The Marines' occupation of Haiti also provoked a militant reaction – the "Caco" insurgencies in which my very grandfather and his cousin Charlemagne Peralte participated in. The first insurgency was put down by the end of 1915. But a second insurgency, prompted in part by abuses of the US-trained Haitian Gendarmerie, erupted late in 1918. The Gendarmerie was unable to contain it, but the First US Marine Brigade succeeded in ending the uprising. Atrocities committed by US military during the second Caco campaign led to Senate hearings during 1921-22. The Marines left Haiti in 1934. Haitian politics soon returned to the authoritarianism, exploitation, and corruption that had characterized most Haitian governments going back to independence in 1804. The American military returned in 1994 to reinstall President Jean-Bertrand Aristide – and again in 2004 this time in a modern day Coup by the US Bush administration to escort him out and help try to make order out of the very same chaos they have helped funded and influenced in Haiti of which they still control.

Dominican Republic: The democratic institutions installed by the United States soon started to unravel after the Marines left the Dominican Republic in 1924, and Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, who had been groomed by the Marines to lead the Dominican National Guard, assumed dictatorial powers in 1930 that would last for more than three decades. Trujillo was assassinated in 1961. The instability that followed precipitated another US military intervention in 1965 motivated principally by concern that the revolution would lead to a "second Cuba" in the Caribbean. The crisis passed, and democratic continuity was more or less established in 1966.

These three examples demonstrate how good intentions expressed through military force and money can be frustrated by cultures that are not congenial to democratic institutions. The Bush administration's idea that "These values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society" ignores the lessons not only of these three cases, but also of the more generalized problems of democratization in the Islamic world, Africa, and Latin America. Surely past and present Bush advisers such as Paul Wolfowitz and Condoleezza Rice have read Alexis de Tocqueville's classic "Democracy in America," but they and Senator McCain (McCant), must have forgotten its overriding lesson: When it comes to the viability of democracy, more than anything else, what the US and all those with World domination in mind do not understand or take into consideration is that, culture matters.


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By Afro Consuello.

The only thing that they have shown with these interventions is that they learned their lessons well from the british empire, their former overlords: allow democracy to flourish at home, while using an iron fist in your dealings with foreign nations, and, when your own force is not enough, force other imperial "allies" to pay the costs of your mess, all in the name of the fulfillment of those "alliances". For example, the current NATO's intervention on the Afghan mess, a mess which the US started.

So US intervention worked???
Well doesn't that suck for you?

Ah exaclty Lautaro... You never ceased to amaze us (well me in particular). Man, are you sure you are fully Dominican (l l)?

Wow okay

I see you are missing the point and that you are all lost buddy. Read the entire article again to get a full grasp of the point being conveyed here.

Laurato gets it already to the point all he did was add a slight continuation to it . Those that will get it, will; and those that will not, simply will not. If the very title of the thread did not sum it all for you, honestly I do not know what will on that of that, we have video clips that projected double talks and all that. Gee, are you okay? I cannot help you there my friend if you do not or cannot get it something as plain and clear as this just so my words are not reinterpreted wrongfully; thus, draw your own conclusion if you must brother.

We are not going to tarnish this thread with nonsense pointless bickering. Read the Article again if you have to until you get it.

Keep reading.

Somehow, nobody seems to believe me on that account, Consuello. It seems that there's this stereotype that, for someone to be considered a dominican, one has to be a party-loving, whore-beater, disorganized, good-for-nothing ignoramus. Apparently, we bookish types can't seem to fit on the mold. LOL

I think that the main teaching of this thread is that, for democracy to work on a given country, the culture of that country must be prepared to embrace it. Anything less than that is destined to meet with dismal failure.

Your point is that Culture matters. My point is that in the case of the D.R. it didn't matter. The US arrived, straightened out the mess and left the D.R. with a vibrant, Western style, democracy.

Yeah, but one with horrendous disparities in wealth distribution, at that. Only Brazil and Haiti surpass us on these social unequalities.

You can say that again brother (l l)!!!

Yes indeed, anything less is quite a feasible prospect for failure indeed. As to go even further to say all the divisiveness you see on the Island of Hispaniola is a lack of understanding those interventions had before they went in dating even way back to Spain Christopher Columbus time. They never understood the culture of those natives as culture and exploration no longer became their interests at heart, however greed and their ego did.

Well I happen to agree with the article that a culture must be ready for democracy, and it isn't something you can impose militarily.

UNLESS...you absolutely crush the nation first. See the experiment did work out decently in Germany, Japan, and South Korea. Those nations were not necessarily any more prepared for democracy; Germany had in fact already failed spectacularly at it. The difference was the scale of military action.

So I'm not sure how to interpret this. Does it mean US should crush more nations? Probably not...but let's be careful how we interpret events. Even if the US has been a blundering, careless giant in the Caribbean, we cannot forget to also BLAME OUR ANCESTORS for failing to run with a good thing when introduced to democracy. Germans and Japanese did it with depleted resources and cities reduced to ash.