Thursday, February 03, 2011

Democracy in Egypt?

We here at the one man web log have generally stayed out of political discussions but there is no hard and fast rule and besides that "so what?" if we do.

I am hearing politicicans talking about our responsibility to spead democracy in Egypt. Today it is John McCain speaking out.

My opinion is that we need to spread democracy here at home and we don't actually have a responsibility to spread our own ideologies around the rest of the world. Spreading our "Ideals" is a little different and that could use some work. Generally American policy has been shortsighted and we have aligned ourselves with who ever was in charge and looked the other way as far as "atrocities" and inhumane behavior. Sadam was our boy at one time. The Shah of Iran was our ally and so was Marcos in the Philipines. We have a fairly long history of aligning ourselves with people who are now probably sitting at a common poker table in hell. Really evil villain types and we stood by them until the people had an uprising and then we unsuccessfully tried to jump onboard. That is a failed policy and it won't work in Egypt any better than it will work in Pakistan if the people over there get worked up.

We promoted the idea of democratic elections in Palestine and they democratically elected a guy from Hamas which is considered to be a terrorist organization and now we don't want to officially recognize him.

My point is that we can't just pick and choose when we want to have high and mighty ideals and then use that as an excuse to stick our noses into the business of governing other countries.

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