Posted by Allen on 1/31/2003, 5:41 pm, in reply to "And then?" The war on terror will end the same way the Cold War ended. The world is shrinking faster all the time. Eventually, the people in the Muslim countries will realize the same thing that the people in the Communist countries realized - that they had been lied to. The rise of a middle class gives rise to political expectations of a participatory type. The Radical Fundamentalists are doomed to The Dustbin of History. It's really racist to presume that Muslims, or Arabs, are constitutionally incapable of liberal democracy. True, in this war, the 50 states are not immune to attack. Fortunately, we are not cowards. My thought is that the calumny we hear so often about how Bush is motivated by a desire to control the Iraqi oilfields is a version of the Big Lie(as you may know, a Big Lie differs from an ordinary one in 2 ways:it is the exact opposite of the truth; it is repeated until it becomes something which "everyone knows"). If all he cared about was oil, he would have cut a deal with Saddam a long time ago - the coalition stops patrolling the no-fly zones, Saddam gets to murder all the Kurds and Shiites he wants, Iraq delivers so many millions of barrels of oil per day. Saddam certainly would have jumped at this deal. But Hedone, you are right - I suspect that Bush will bungle the post-war handling of Iraq. It's a shame. Iraq is modern, western-style fascist police state, perfectly amenable to democratization of the type we enforced in Germany and Japan after WWII. However, the cost of such a program would require inflationary fiscal and monetary policy in the U.S., and the Replutocrats and the Demagouges are notoriously disinterested in long-term matters.
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Hedone,
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