Money allows a former mujahideen commander to do pretty much what he wants with young dancing boys in Afghanistan, and even to talk about it publicly.

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/124334-frontline-the-dancing-boys-of-afghanistan

Power is Power

“The boy should be attractive. Who’s good for dancing, around 12 or 13 and good-looking. I tell their parents I will train them.” Dastager is riding in a car, the Afghan desertscape stretching far beyond the window. He explains that boys and their parents agree to Dastager’s terms because he pays them. “You look for poor boys who have nothing?” asks Frontline correspondent Najibullah Quraishi. “Yes,” nods Dastager. “They’re poor.”

This explanation—so simple and so awful—covers a lot of ground in The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan. Money allows Dastager, a former mujahideen commander, now a wealthy businessman who travels with bodyguards who are also on the local police force, to do pretty much what he wants, and even to talk about it publicly. Turned around to face the camera poised in the back seat of his car, he looks forward to meeting the new boy he has in mind, a child named here Shafiq. As the boy approaches the car (his face digitally blurred), Quraishi narrates: “Dastager said that Shafiq was 11.But to me, he looked no more than nine.”

Shafiq is about to enter into the world of bacha bazi (which translates as “boy play”). As the program points out, such traffic was banned by the Taliban and remains illegal today, but its wealthy, well-connected practitioners see it as a necessary emblem of power and privilege. As Mestary, puts it, he started keeping “boy partners” while he was a senior commander with the Northern Alliance: “Every commander had one. There’s competition amongst the commanders, [and] without one, I couldn’t compete.” Now that he’s married he says, he might still have sex with a boy, but only after asking his wife: “In Afghanistan, men don’t listen to their wives,” he says, “but I’m a cultured person, I discuss it with my wife first.”

The Frontline camera follows Dastager along to parties, where bacha bazi boys dance for crowds of men, and are frequently sold or traded to men who keep “stables.” (Quraishi confides to his audience that he’s lied to Dastager about the nature of the project in order to gain access.) Some of the boys wear women’s clothes and learn to sing love songs. Slavery being illegal, the actual numbers of bacha bazi owners remains unknown, the secrecy helped along by government officials and law enforcement representatives also involved in the sales/trading rings and parties.

Thirteen-year-old Abdullah says his parents and friends don’t know what he’s doing. When Quraishi speaks with Abdullah, his owner and a sort of manager, Rafe, stand nearby. “I had a passion for it,” he says by way of explaining how he started dancing. At 15, Imam is already a “veteran” performer (he first appears as he sings these lyrics: “You rally make me want to lose control”). Imam says he plans to have his own stable of boys when he turns 18 (the film doesn’t examine the pathology of bacha bazi per se, but it does suggest the business is a cycle premised on money and tradition, or at least a horrific sort of habit). As the boy dances for a gathering of men, his owner Golhom appears appreciative and attentive (he wipes the boy’s face with a towel, tenderly), then sends him home with Dastager for that night. The Frontline camera remains on the sidewalk as Dastager ushers the boy into his car, which then pulls away, disappearing into the night.

Quraishi supplements his interviews with bacha bazi boys, owners, and a blond-bearded pimp called The German, by speaking as well with Radhika Coomaraswamy, U.N. special representative for Children and Armed Conflict. She describes the difficulty of prosecuting offenders; the one instance of punishment documented here has to do with a boy’s murder. Quraishi visits with the victim’s mother and brother, and together they look at photos of Hafiz’s bloody corpse. He was trying to get out of bacha bazi, she says, but was killed with a gun supplied by a local policeman. The murderer was convicted, then released after just 16 months. “If only these people were punished,” the mother observes, this kind of thing wouldn’t happen. Whoever commits these crimes doesn’t get punished. Power is power.”

Covering such heartbreak and abuse has unexpected effects on Quraishi and the Frontline crew, and changed the documentary’s shape as well. Originally scheduled to air last year, The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan was postponed until now, as one of the profiled boys escaped his owner and was relocated—events put in motion when Frontline producer Jamie Duran “consulted with “Western authorities” and got help from Mestary (“He seemed to have become more sensitive to the damage done by bacha bazi”). It’s a strangely heartening and necessarily vague story, involving help as well from the “Afghan government.”

Centuries of irresistible western/jewish influence, innit?

Quote:

“In Afghanistan, men don’t listen to their wives,” he says, “but I’m a cultured person, I discuss it with my wife first.”

Jesus Christ...what a hell-hole Afghanistan is. I'm writing an article at the moment about Afghani women and self immolation; the more research I do, the more I realise what a cesspool of corruption and horror that place is. It's heartbreaking.

Pretty disgusting. I've heard similar stories from other countries where law and order were non existent, especially for those in power. Sierra Leone is an example.

Afghanistan seems to be caught in a barbaric timewarp more in line with the standards of Genghis Khan that any modern day equivalent. It's ironic considering that the region has given rise to so many civilisations.

Of course it's worth mentioning that past civilisations had moral standards which were different from our own. The Ancient Greeks and Romans spring to mind.

I've seen a doco on this subject. I found it to be a little bit sad, but certainly not horrifc. Horrific was seeing young women stoned to death for crimes against alan at the hands of the taliban.

The Afghans are largely about as tribal as there is in this modern world, but if you were brought up in that environment, it probably wouldn't be such a big deal.
If a reciprocated doco were shown to them, about say, women telling them what to do and having ultimate control over their money, they might find this to be quite horrifc. I do  ;D

The kids are trained to dance, and it seems that they usually have the ambition of being the next "big thing" within that specific bent of Afghan society. It's not too different to the ambitions of people in certain sections of our society, which is probably at least as widespread as the dancing boy practice, as well as being officially legal.

Before thinking that you should jump up and save these people, you should think about saving yourself first. They may not be as much in need of saving as you might imagine, and it might be you that actually needs the saving.i

Amadd, you don't find the sexual abuse and exploitation of children horrific?

muso wrote on Apr 22^nd, 2010 at 8:50am:

It's ironic considering that the region has given rise to so many civilisations.

It has given rise to no civilisation. Neither the land nor the people have ever been cultivated. Other civilisations marched through the place on the way to somewhere else, perhaps.

Amadd wrote on Apr 22^nd, 2010 at 9:47am:

I've seen a doco on this subject. I found it to be a little bit sad, but certainly not horrifc. Horrific was seeing young women stoned to death for crimes against alan at the hands of the taliban. The Afghans are largely about as tribal as there is in this modern world, but if you were brought up in that environment, it probably wouldn't be such a big deal. If a reciprocated doco were shown to them, about say, women telling them what to do and having ultimate control over their money, they might find this to be quite horrifc. I do  ;D The kids are trained to dance, and it seems that they usually have the ambition of being the next "big thing" within that specific bent of Afghan society. It's not too different to the ambitions of people in certain sections of our society, which is probably at least as widespread as the dancing boy practice, as well as being officially legal. Before thinking that you should jump up and save these people, you should think about saving yourself first. They may not be as much in need of saving as you might imagine, and it might be you that actually needs the saving.

It is a charmless, brutal place and its only slight concession to refinement is to dress these objects of lust as girls. They are not training them for the Kabul Opera and Ballet, only for pederasty.

But they have all performed the Shahada so it is OK.

Soren wrote on Apr 22^nd, 2010 at 10:14am:

muso wrote on Apr 22nd, 2010 at 8:50am: It's ironic considering that the region has given rise to so many civilisations. It has given rise to no civilisation. Neither the land nor the people have ever been cultivated. Other civilisations marched through the place on the way to somewhere else, perhaps.

Well I was thinking of the Aryans and the Indus Valley civilisations.

The original homeland of the Aryans encompasses Northern Afghanistan and Tajikstan. The Rig Veda keeps referring to Soma, which is a 'herbal stimulant' which was grown only in those regions. The Rig Veda described the fact that it grew in the mountains and its method of preparation.

When the regions became too arid, there was a considerable volksvanderung from this region, which provided the archaic origins of the Indo European language. Arguably a number of civilisations ultimately sprung from that migration including the Vedic.

So when I say 'given rise', I was talking in that context.

Quote:

It is a charmless, brutal place and its only slight concession to refinement is to dress these objects of lust as girls. They are not training them for the Kabul Opera and Ballet, only for pederasty. But they have all performed the Shahada so it is OK.

That's fine for you to state an opinion from your own personal perspective, but you haven't grown up there and probably haven't lived there, so to prejudge them and to think that most Afghan men want sex with boys is only displaying a learned ignorance.
Personally, I found the dancing to be quite entertaining. That doesn't mean that I'd desire sex with them just because I found the dancing to be intriguing to watch and saw some of the dancers to be very talented in their movement.

You might want to realise what our young children (younger than the Afghan dancers) are being taught through our media. It can be a bit disconcerting when your mate's 8yr old daugther asks you if you think she's sexy.
Our society teaches them at a very young age that they should be sexy, whether you know it or like it or not. By the time they are 16, they have already had drilled into them that their body is just a tool.

Is there ANYTHING foreigners do that we will not well-meaningly, reflexively defend by hinting or implying that perhaps we are worse?

Let's extend our military presence there indefinitely so we can turn them all into good, happy liberals. This is completely foolproof and totally worth our time.

aikmann4 wrote on Apr 22^nd, 2010 at 3:40pm:

Let's extend our military presence there indefinitely so we can turn them all into good, happy liberals. This is completely foolproof and totally worth our time.

Mate, I don't care whether they vote liberal or labor. They're Afghanis. Who fvckin cares?

As long as we get those pipelines going we can get in there and give the damned place a shake-up.

I like a dancing boy as much as anyone else - as long as you're firing a Stier at his feet to keep him going. They're bone-lazy otherwise.

If you ask me, they'd be better off voting in the Shooter's Party. That'll get the place going.

Quote:

As long as we get those pipelines going we can get in there and give the damned place a shake-up.

Now you're thinking real geopolitics!

Indeed. Actually, just 'thinking' would go an unusually long way in this case.

The Enterprise of Nations
by David S. Landes
Critics have tried to explain away the West’s centuries-long economic domination of the globe; they would do better to study its lessons.
http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/article.cfm?AID=1613


A taste:
"The older centers of hither and farther Asia—the Islamic world, India, and China—lacked the cultural and institutional foundations on which entrepreneurship rested. Worse: They tended to cling to tradition in a world of disturbing and disagreeable challenge. Both China and the Arabic Middle East offer case studies of this resistance to innovation and the subsequent national revenge against those they blamed for the economic disparities that ensued. Both impoverished themselves by insisting on their cultural, moral, and technical superiority over the barbarians around them, by refusing to learn from people they scorned as inferiors, by simply refusing to learn. Pride is poison, and as the proverb puts it, pride goeth before a fall."



Just so.

Barbarians, like the Afghans, are barbarians because they would not learn. They think they know all there is to know. They would not learn because they think it is beneath them.  Not for them 'enlightened self-interest'.

Quote:

That's fine for you to state an opinion from your own personal perspective, but you haven't grown up there and probably haven't lived there, so to prejudge them and to think that most Afghan men want sex with boys is only displaying a learned ignorance.

What makes you think we think that? Obviously it is only targetted at the men who want to have sex with little boys. The men who want to have sex with little girls are allowed to marry up to four of them. But then they are stuck with them for life.


Annie Anthrax wrote on Apr 22^nd, 2010 at 8:15am:

Quote: “In Afghanistan, men don’t listen to their wives,” he says, “but I’m a cultured person, I discuss it with my wife first.” Jesus Christ...what a hell-hole Afghanistan is. I'm writing an article at the moment about Afghani women and self immolation; the more research I do, the more I realise what a cesspool of corruption and horror that place is. It's heartbreaking.

Interesting. I hadn't seen that before.

http://www.warisboring.com/?p=467

“They Burn Themselves”
Wednesday August 01st 2007, 1:03 am
Filed under: Afghanistan, Iraq

   Amine … is 16 years old. She was forced to marry at the age of 14 but has many problems with her husband and his family. She doused herself with oil and set herself on fire to protest her unwanted marriage but her father says that she must return to her husband because there is no such thing as divorce in their family. She has burns over 33% of her body. She has vowed to kill herself if forced to go back.

self-immolation_afghanistan.jpgSo reports WIB-pal Anne Holmes, aka Vigilante Journalist, from Herat, Afghanistan:

   Many young Afghan girls are forced to marry men who are much older than them. Often they suffer physical, sexual and psychological abuses at the hands of their husbands and/or his family. These young women are also often forced into prostitution by their husbands but rarely admit this publicly because it is too shameful in Afghan society. Setting themselves on fire is a common form of protest or suicide, but there are virtually no social services in place to help these young women out of their situations and accord them their proper rights. Most of them are forced to go back to their unwanted husbands and it is unclear what their fate is thereafter.

It’s not just an Afghan problem. Self-immolation is all too common in many Islamic cultures. I reported on the tragic phenomenon from Iraqi Kurdistan last year for The Village Voice:

   “Here in Kurdistan, there is a lot of violence against Kurdish women,” [radio host Sirwa] Ali says in delicate English. She’s an Iranian Kurd by birth, a swimmer by training, and superbly educated by Iraqi standards, lending a quiet confidence to her words. Asked who is perpetrating this violence, she doesn’t hesitate: “Men, of course. Husbands, brothers, fathers, managers. All men.”

   Abuse drives many Kurdish women to suicide, says Ali. “Here in Kurdistan, most women, when they want to kill themselves, they burn themselves. I don’t know why.”

   Regional assemblywoman Vian Dizyee does. She says that in a society where women have few resources at their disposal, sophisticated methods of suicide are impossible. So women self-immolate using household items like cooking fuel and matches.

Soren wrote on Apr 22^nd, 2010 at 7:00pm:

Indeed. Actually, just 'thinking' would go an unusually long way in this case. The Enterprise of Nations by David S. Landes Critics have tried to explain away the West’s centuries-long economic domination of the globe; they would do better to study its lessons. http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/article.cfm?AID=1613 A taste: "The older centers of hither and farther Asia—the Islamic world, India, and China—lacked the cultural and institutional foundations on which entrepreneurship rested. Worse: They tended to cling to tradition in a world of disturbing and disagreeable challenge. Both China and the Arabic Middle East offer case studies of this resistance to innovation and the subsequent national revenge against those they blamed for the economic disparities that ensued. Both impoverished themselves by insisting on their cultural, moral, and technical superiority over the barbarians around them, by refusing to learn from people they scorned as inferiors, by simply refusing to learn. Pride is poison, and as the proverb puts it, pride goeth before a fall." Just so. Barbarians, like the Afghans, are barbarians because they would not learn. They think they know all there is to know. They would not learn because they think it is beneath them.  Not for them 'enlightened self-interest'.

This has absolutely NOTHING to do with the topic, Soren, but it warrants a reply.

China is successful, not because it has embraced freemarket policies, but because it has maintained a form of state corporatism: keeping the yuan down, keeping wages down, and maintaining high state ownership of key industries.

The "barbarian" economies of UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have high GDPs, and in the case of the Saudis, 80% of industry is state owned.

The reason the US said they went into Iraq, if you remember (after the WMD excuse backfired), was to spread "freedom" and "democracy" throughout the region. What this meant is they wanted to open up countries like Saudi Arabia to foreign investment. Read: open them up to US markets.

The countries in your article that have supposedly done so well from free-market policies, like Ireland and Finland, have suffered hugely through the GFC and their reliance on the fickleness of the global financial markets, and herein lies the rub:

The free-trade policies championed in your article have produced nothing but financial speculation. It's not about innovation, or starting up a business and taking a risk, just the transfer of existing capital. Most speculation, like that of the big hedge funds, acts to transfer the risk to someone else. Globalization is a response to surplus capital, and a complete lack of innovation or real investment. It's also a reaction to over-supply and the need for increased growth. Globalization - and its free-market stewardship - is almost solely about commodity and currency speculation, not any trickle-down solutions for the world's poor. Most global investment is spent on corporate takeovers.

This is why Africa is still dirt-poor, and not because of the lack of air conditioning. African slaves in another era of free-market globalization did not have the luxury of air conditioning either.

And the reason Australia is so rich? Not because of any Western brains-trust or "natural" superiority, but because, like the "barbarian" economies of Saudi Arabia, UAE and Kuwait, of what lies underneath: (in our case) coal and iron ore - and China's willingness to snap it up at any price.

Lucky country indeed.

The Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars seems to have missed the latest crash in world speculative markets since 1987 and 2001: the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, and the crucial lessons to be learned from this.

Interesting that your article says this:

"Both (China and Arabic countries) impoverished themselves by insisting on their cultural, moral, and technical superiority over the barbarians around them, by refusing to learn from people they scorned as inferiors, by simply refusing to learn. Pride is poison, and as the proverb puts it, pride goeth before a fall."

The US's escapade into Iraq was exactly what the argument above demonstrates: national revenge on the economic disparities that ensued from the oil crisies of the early 1970s (when Cheney and Rumsfeld were in the White House), and then the recession of 2000-2001 caused by the tech bubble bust. Not to mention the US's addiction to oil, and their unwillingness to innovate new sources of fuel.

But before you blame the Afghanis for being too arrogant to learn, ask yourself why the current situation in Afghanistan (post-Soviet invasion, post-Taliban, post-US invasion) might make it a rather unattractive site for foreign investment.

Unlike Iraq, there aren't a lot of state-owned industries to sell off two weeks after the Americans move in.

There is always the opium, I guess. And that IS doing well: the reason the heroin drought has now broken in Australia. Now there's a real global industry for you, not mere currency speculation or corporate takeover.

Anyway, back to the dancing boys...

There is so much nonsense in this post that I don't think I have the strength to address them all. But briefly:

China is successful in a very narrow sense only- it has an artificial trade surplus. In another sense it is on the verge of unimaginable conflagration.

Saudi et all ARE open to foreign investment. Indeed, without foreign investment and effort, there would be no oil industry there. Probablly there would be no Saudi - just as there woul be no 'kuwait'. These places exists because we indulged them - we went along with the wheeze that they are countries and not just rival gangs.

The grim Islamists are sore to the extent that these make-belief countries are open to foreign investment and the effort that comes with protecting that investment. They don't like that we are taking sides in their age-old gang warfare. Look at the Koran it is the chronicle of gang war.

Afghanistan - you would be as ignorant of the place as you are of much else if they had not been behind flying planes into the World Trade Centre. The only significance of Afghanistan, ever, has been that it is IN THE WAY. All they have ever done is rub people up the wrong way. They are not poor because they are 'too arrogant' to learn. No. They are too stupid to learn. They are stupid because they, like all other barbarians, think that there is a royal road to - what exactly? Back to past glory. That's all they want. Fantasy land. They are all fantasising about some imaginary glory 'back when'.

The US went into Iraq to 'kill the chicken and let the monkeys watch'. The US, or Australia for that matter, are not in the business of recreating the glorious past. Learning and renewal are the only way for these countries to be. There is no past worth returning to because the mindset is that today is better than yesterday. For the barbarian who are too stupid to learn, today is only as good as it approximates the mythical golden 'yesterday' For them, everything is in the service of what's gone, irretrievably. Today is in the service of the glory that was yesterday. Stupid.

Australia: this country is not only rich but decent. Can't say that for China, Saudi or all others. On the other hand, Finland was not well-off even before Nokia just because of all the timber. Denmark is not well off because of all the milk and blue cheese. Only the barbarians think that money is the answer. They want money to recreate their past. Australia or the US strive to actually make life better for actual people.

The dancing boys of Afghanistan are as good an indicator of the pathologies of barbarian places as any. In the context of Islam, they sadly illustrate the massive gap between lofty idealism and sordid reality. No culture is free from this discrepancy. How they deal with it varies enormously. Barbarians pretend it's a non-issue. Civilised people grapple with the mismatch between ideals and realities. ANd most importantly, they take on the responsibility for their own shortcomings.

Barbarians, having learned only one thing from the civilised, will always stop at merely crying for compo and for absolution for their own deeds. ANd are forever looking,  shiftilily, for someone else to blame for where and what they are.  No Islamic country (no barbarian country)  will take responsibility for its falling so short of all its ideals. Barbarians are unselfconscious. That's what barbarity is.

Quote:

China is successful, not because it has embraced freemarket policies, but because it has maintained a form of state corporatism

It is successful because it is keeping it's population down, and because it is moving steadily towards capitalism without making all the mistakes that Russia made. It still has a long way to go and it still has to get rid of all the barriers to free trade.

Soren wrote on Apr 23^rd, 2010 at 8:17pm:

There is so much nonsense in this post that I don't think I have the strength to address them all. But briefly: China is successful in a very narrow sense only- it has an artificial trade surplus. In another sense it is on the verge of unimaginable conflagration. Saudi et all ARE open to foreign investment. Indeed, without foreign investment and effort, there would be no oil industry there. Probablly there would be no Saudi - just as there woul be no 'kuwait'. These places exists because we indulged them - we went along with the wheeze that they are countries and not just rival gangs.

I agree completely about China, but you'd hardly call them barbarians. There are many aspects to the war in Iraq, but on the face of it, the US wanted to introduce freedom and democracy to the Middle East.

Freedom means free markets, and nothing else. This agenda wants privatization in all areas, not just oil exports (although this is the one area where the US are allied to Saudi Arabia).

Democracy is much more obscure. The US have supported Arab fiefdoms for years. Democracy? From Diem to Pinochet to Saddam, the US NEVER supports democracy. Anyway, the US can't support democracy: it must be built from the ground up.

So democracy was a lie.

But what the US really wanted was to "secure" oil reserves, meaning keeping them in Western hands and out of the control of China. This is the US's bargaining chip, and it's why they've got their eye on Iran most of all.

Iran and China have united, and this is their worry.

Quote:

Anyway, the US can't support democracy: it must be built from the ground up.

It's easier to do that if the supporters of democracy aren't getting killed off by the current dictator.

Karnal wrote on Apr 25^th, 2010 at 12:39am:

Freedom means free markets, and nothing else.

Look, just that one line shows that you are talking sh!t as a matter of personal policy.  
Be contrarian, be post-modern, be challenging. But don't be just another I-am-thick-and-proud-of-it idiot.

Karnal wrote on Apr 25^th, 2010 at 12:39am:

I agree completely about China, but you'd hardly call them barbarians.

Yes, you can safely call them barbarians. Simply look at them and see how they treat each other. See how they treat their weak, their unfortunate. See how they treat their minorities.  See how they treat their animals. See how they organise their country, their society.  Being around for  a long time does not matter in itself. Australia has been around for a mere 222 years, yet it it more civilised than China.

Soren wrote on Apr 25^th, 2010 at 8:58pm:

Karnal wrote on Apr 25th, 2010 at 12:39am: Freedom means free markets, and nothing else. Look, just that one line shows that you are talking sh!t as a matter of personal policy.   Be contrarian, be post-modern, be challenging. But don't be just another I-am-thick-and-proud-of-it idiot.

Well, rebutt away. Tell me why I'm talking sh!t.

If you can't, I'll continue to be "contrarian." Contrarian to whom?

I'm assuming you mean the Wilsonian Institute, who - let me see -  advocate a strong interventionalist foreign policy agenda for which global power?

That would be the US, right?

Sorry to be so thick.

freediver wrote on Apr 25^th, 2010 at 8:32am:

Quote: Anyway, the US can't support democracy: it must be built from the ground up. It's easier to do that if the supporters of democracy aren't getting killed off by the current dictator.

But harder to do that if you actively support dictators.

If you can tell me of one "democracy" that the US has supported or installed since, say, the Korean War, I'll eat my hat.

How about two? Afghanistan. Iraq.

What about germany karnal, does that count?
The US always supported the re-unification of germany, and that did help get rid of that totalitarian regime in east germany as I recall it, in fact the whole eastern bloc, but I could be wrong.

People get far too carried away believing things have to always be black and white, when it is always just shades of grey.

Sure the US have a lot of blood on their hands from supporting imperialist  style foreign policy after WW2, but they did have real threats to deal with, like communism to name one, they were not operating in a vacuum.

It is often the lesser evil we strive for, as utopia has proved as elusive as ever.

freediver wrote on Apr 27^th, 2010 at 8:59pm:

How about two? Afghanistan. Iraq.

I'm still wearing my hat, FD.

Quote:

Democracy support is a long-term investment, but when coupled with diplomatic commitment, it works. Critics of this policy need only look to Chile, El Salvador, South Korea, Taiwan, Georgia, or Ukraine, countries where U.S. administrations patiently employed democracy policies for seven to ten years before the "overnight" victories of citizens against entrenched regimes. In all of these countries, regional experts counseled that, for various cultural reasons, democracy could not take root, and realists counseled that democracy should not take root

That was taken from an article at a site about Middle Eastern Politics.
http://www.meforum.org/942/will-us-democratization-policy-work

I hope it is one of those 'Nacho" hats karnal.

mozzaok wrote on Apr 27^th, 2010 at 9:10pm:

What about germany karnal, does that count? The US always supported the re-unification of germany, and that did help get rid of that totalitarian regime in east germany as I recall it, in fact the whole eastern bloc, but I could be wrong. People get far too carried away believing things have to always be black and white, when it is always just shades of grey. Sure the US have a lot of blood on their hands from supporting imperialist  style foreign policy after WW2, but they did have real threats to deal with, like communism to name one, they were not operating in a vacuum. It is often the lesser evil we strive for, as utopia has proved as elusive as ever.

Good point. You could also say Japan.

And actually, you could also say Israel, but they did liberal democracy on their own.

But since the Cold War, I can't think of one. Pinnochet? Saddam? The Contras? My point is that these dictatorships all prove "destabilising" in the end. They might narrowly advance US interests in the short-term, but they fail in the long run.

Which is why, of course, Bush vered away from foreign policy "realism" towards the moral cause of imposing "democracy." This project of democratisation, however, was always intended to be strictly in the US's interests, which is why they held off on elections in Iraq. This allowed the US contractors and Rebublican allies to grab what they could. This gave them the time to sell off state assets and demolish the machinery of state.

A policy the US did NOT do in Germany, where they often left low-key Nazi administrators to do their jobs.

The "lesser evil" you could say.

Mozzaok, your article notes US tolerance of democratically-elected groups like Hamas:

"U.S. policymakers are not pleased with the rise of groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, but President Bush's willingness to recognize the election results should silence skeptics of U.S. commitment to democratic reform. After the Hamas victory, regional critics would have difficulty maintaining the theory that democracy promotion is meant to install puppet regimes. That said, as with the case of Hamas, accepting the result of a democratic election does not signal U.S. endorsement of the resulting regime. "

However, "not being pleased" is an understatement. Bush refused to deal with Hezbollah, and was then reluctant to deal with Hamas, stating that the US would not deal with terrorists. It stood by and refused to comment while Israel first bombed Southern Lebanon (to erradicate Hezbollah), and then the West Bank in an effort to destroy Hamas.

Remember?

In other words, through its support of Israel, the US was able to carry out its war on terror, and undermine democratically-elected regimes in the Middle East.

Of course these groups aren't democratic, but that misses the point. The US wants democracy on its terms, and as such will only support its friends. This is not freedom or democracy if you happen to live in the Middle East. It can only be seen for what it is: the administration of US empire.

Quote:

In other words, through its support of Israel, the US was able to carry out its war on terror, and undermine democratically-elected regimes in the Middle East.

I think you are missing the point a bit Karnal. That would be like complaining the US undermined the democratically elected Hitler. All the support of democracy means is that you recognise the will of the people in their elected leaders. It doesn't mean you have to agree with or put up with what some other group of people voted for. Democracy is only part of the picture.

freediver wrote on Apr 28^th, 2010 at 7:40pm:

Quote: In other words, through its support of Israel, the US was able to carry out its war on terror, and undermine democratically-elected regimes in the Middle East. I think you are missing the point a bit Karnal. That would be like complaining the US undermined the democratically elected Hitler. All the support of democracy means is that you recognise the will of the people in their elected leaders. It doesn't mean you have to agree with or put up with what some other group of people voted for. Democracy is only part of the picture.

My point, FD, is that the US have systematically undermined the will of people and their elected governments. They supported the coup against Allende in Chile, the Contras against the Sandanistas in El Salvador, the Marcos regime in the Philippines, ignored Ho Chi Minh when he advocated a US-style liberal democracy against the French in Vietnam, and they even backed the National Party in Australia against the Whitlam government.

And on it goes.

But they support the Saudis, and they support a host of military regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere when it suits their needs, and they continue to do so.

The US have two roles: to support their own geopolitical needs, and to support the interests of global capital (based largely in New York). These needs sometimes intersect - as was the case in Iraq, where they believed Saddam was a threat to their national security, and where they wanted a new military foothold in the Middle East to counter Iran, but also to secure important global oil reserves.

And the US cements its power in organisations like the UN Security Council and NATO on the one hand, and in the World Bank, the IMF and WTO on the other. Global free trade is essential to understanding how US power works.

I do believe that the US were once a power that acted to promote democracy (although, again, in their interest), but that during the Cold War they had to match their rivals in the Soviet Union with policies they termed "realist." They moved away from promoting democracy, and this was what George Bush was referring to with his alleged foreign policy "moralism." The move to installing democracies - even before Sept 11 - came back on the agenda.

But, like Bush, it was shallow, and countered by the "realists" in his administration like Rumsfeld and Cheney. Bush talked the talk, and the Hawks carried on business as usual. The rise in Haliburton stock prices tells you much about how the two policies of regime change and assisting the multinationals worked together. Iraq was the first war in modern history that relied extensively on contractors to provide security and other services.

The will of the people counts for nothing - you should know this by now. The will of corporate Washington lobby groups and the "invisible hand" of the marketplace is what America is all about.

Pretty fair analysis karnal, but it is based a lot on the subjective analysis of what is or isn't legitimate concerns.

Sure they supported terrible regimes, who committed vile atrocities, but they were always choices that they believed were in the best interest of america, which is only natural after all, and I agree that capitalist agendas often led them to make very poor choices.

However, when you look at the situation in Iraq, and Afghanistan, you have to take into account just how great a threat does having extremist totalitarian Islamist regimes pose to the rest of the world?

The Taliban are pure scum, and the world would be a vastly better place if all traces of their existence were wiped from the planet, there is not a single reason you could give that would ever make me retreat from that position.

Then you have Iran, another evil empire of religious bigots and totalitarian shia clerics whose desire to annihilate Israel, and to become a nuclear power are such impending threats, that the thought of having a US presence right next to them to keep them in line, is frankly reassuring, at least until we see Islam turn it's back on fundamentalism, and extremist Islamists promoting and perpetrating religiously inspired violence.

Iran has the possibility of ejecting the clerics who currently enslave it, but they will need western support to do that, and for their sake, as well as the world's, I hope they get it.

So, while I agree the US has made many bad calls, when you are facing the toughest decisions on the planet, that will happen sometimes.

mozzaok wrote on Apr 29^th, 2010 at 11:45am:

The Taliban are pure scum, and the world would be a vastly better place if all traces of their existence were wiped from the planet, there is not a single reason you could give that would ever make me retreat from that position. ... So, while I agree the US has made many bad calls, when you are facing the toughest decisions on the planet, that will happen sometimes.

Mozzaok, the Taliban exist largely because of the policies of two empires: the Soviet Union and the US.

The Khmer Rouge were also evil scum (created by the US carpet-bombing of Cambodia), but the US did nothing about them. It was left up to Vietnam to rid the world of Pol Pot.

What has changed, I guess, is information technology. These local regimes are now able to recruit - and act - globally. I've got no problem with the US intervening against the Taliban. How it does so is a different matter. Backing the Northern Alliance didn't do much good. I understand these are very tough decisions to make.

But Iran is a different story. The US have a beef with Iran because they deposed the US's puppet, the Shah, and then created the Iran hostage crisis. It's very tempting to view Iran through Western eyes. Sure, the religious police are tyrants, but no worse than many other US-backed states, such as Saudi Arabia. The US fear Iran becoming a regional power, and this is actually happening before their eyes - this, if you remember, is why they backed Saddam: to keep Iran in check.

Iran has been open to US diplomacy, but the US hasn't wanted to play. Obama signalled an end to this freeze, and it'll be interesting to see if this bears fruit. There is a big middle-class in Iran, and the oil dollars have ushered in a consumer economy. Persians in the cities are generally well-educated. It's a huge mistake to see Iran as some backward, militantly Islamic country.

What the US fears is Iran's traditional trading ties with Russia, and its new relationship with China. Iran could also capitalise on its proximity to ex-Soviet states, rich in gas and minerals, such as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, which separate Iran from China. Look at a map: Iran sits right between the Arab peninsular and the East.

This is the concern for Iran, not it's "evilness," but the relationships it could form to cut the US out of its trade hegemony in the middle east.

The US tried the nuclear ruse with Saddam and the nuclear fuel-rod truck that could have been anything. No one knows if Iran is developing nuclear weapons, or if they would represent a credible threat.

The US has no interest in the Iranian people. They don't want democracy (even if the recent demonstrations showed that democracy is Iran is now a real issue, and even a possibility). What the US want is a quiet and compliant buffer between China and the Middle East.

Once again, it's pure geopolitics, not any attempt to create democracy or "stability".

Stability means US hegemony, and nothing else.

Quote:

The Khmer Rouge were also evil scum (created by the US carpet-bombing of Cambodia), but the US did nothing about them. It was left up to Vietnam to rid the world of Pol Pot

I could not agree more karnal, and like that example you gave, many of the US's worst crimes, have been to ignore wholesale slaughter by dictators, on a selective basis, because if you set yourself up as world police you should try and appear even handed about it.

In their defence, I can also see how after receiving so much heat from their debacle in Vietnam, they did not want to go anywhere near that region again.
I think that may have been their rationale, but I agree they should have intervened there, as they should have in Rwanda, or even earlier in Uganda, or any of the numerous other african nations that went on genocidal rampages.

That fact, that they seem to pick and choose where to intervene based on what economic or political gain is in it for them, rather than any humanitarian concerns, is a pretty damning and valid criticism, which they need to address.

mozzaok wrote on Apr 29^th, 2010 at 12:50pm:

[quote] That fact, that they seem to pick and choose where to intervene based on what economic or political gain is in it for them, rather than any humanitarian concerns, is a pretty damning and valid criticism, which they need to address.

Who does anything different? The US does have national interests and they are above the interests of thugocracies. Fancy that.

Except, of course, the US is the first to offer humnitarian aid when a disaster strikes anywhere - Iranian or Burmese earthquake, floods, landslides trunamis - and if permnitted, its always the US navy that there with the goods.

Soren wrote on Apr 29^th, 2010 at 5:13pm:

mozzaok wrote on Apr 29th, 2010 at 12:50pm: [quote] That fact, that they seem to pick and choose where to intervene based on what economic or political gain is in it for them, rather than any humanitarian concerns, is a pretty damning and valid criticism, which they need to address. Who does anything different? The US does have national interests and they are above the interests of thugocracies. Fancy that. Except, of course, the US is the first to offer humnitarian aid when a disaster strikes anywhere - Iranian or Burmese earthquake, floods, landslides trunamis - and if permnitted, its always the US navy that there with the goods.

Sorry, old boy, the NGOs are usually the first to offer aid, and the US sometimes follows their lead.

Of course, the US has a long tradition of corporate benevolence: Ted Turner paid their UN fees when the US refused to do so.