Quote:
Originally posted by RawAlex@Nov 19 2004, 03:21 PM
Colin, Japan and Germany are the results of "world war"... Ivory coast is a result of, well, internal strife.
Can't compare the two properly.
Can't even compare German to Iraq... the scale and situation just is no the same.
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In your post that I replied to, you implied that being "forced" to be free isn't "really free". At the end of World War II the nonconsensual governments of Japan and Germany were forced into becoming constitutional democracies. They were forced ... and now they are free. What does the scale have to do with my observation? If Afganistan, Iraq or both become stable democracies then I would argue that they are free and it happened as a result of war. History shows over and over again that you can occupy a nation's capital, replace its leaders and leave the people with a far better life than they had before. All of this happens against the will of many of the citizens themseves who in the end realize it was actually all for the better. Yes, the same people who were armed and fighting back. Bizarre? Nope. Just the way it goes.
I guess you could take the point that no one is free. After all, we are all slaves to our governments in various degrees. The concept of "free" would loose its meaning in that case though. At any rate, I prefer to think of myself as living under Rousseau's "Social Contract".
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Were Germans freed at the end of World War II? Were the Japanese freed at the end of World War II? Are the citizens of nonconsensual governments "free" in the first place? I'd say Germans citizens are "free" today. How did they get that way?
How about the UN sending troops into countries such as Ivory Coast? How about the UN sending troops into North Korea in 1950? And why DIDN'T the UN send troops into Czechoslovakia in 1968?
Can the UN decide any better than the US can? Are such actions more ethical when decided by a majority of nations with no vetoes than by any one nation?