In the 2010 election, with both Sunni and Shia support, the non‑sectarian, nationalist Iraqiya bloc won two seats more than Nouri al‑Maliki’s State of Law coalition. But many MPs were disqualified by the de‑Ba’athification committees, while Maliki demanded a recount and then manoeuvred to stay on as prime minister. To his military’s disgust, Obama ignored the deadlock for two months. Chris Hill, the new US ambassador, told Odierno that Iraq wasn’t ready for democracy and needed a Shia strongman. An opinion poll disagreed: only 14% of Iraqis thought Maliki should stay in power. But the Iranians lobbied hard to preserve him and thus to alienate Iraq from the rest of the Arab world. Obama’s acquiescence led one of Sky’s Iraqi informants to complain: “Either the Americans are stupid or there is a secret deal with Iran” – a view that is still more widespread today. Where Bush made democracy a totem, and thought it could be delivered via occupation, Obama gave up on it entirely. The results of this equally misguided (and orientalist) approach are painfully evident today.Well, where does that leave us? You can't give up on democracy, but you also can't deliver it by occupation. That leaves, perhaps, nation-building without occupation. I'm not asking rhetorically. I genuinely don't understand why some nations, at some times, manage to crawl out of tyranny, or how they stay out of it for a time. The only glimmer of an idea I have is economic and intellectual/religious freedom combined with vigorous communal opposition to theft and violence.
Totem or pipe dream?
I've been reading good reviews of a new memoir by Emma Sky about occupied Iraq under the Bush and Obama administrations. It's said to be personally generous and even-handed, so I was interested to read this summing up:
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It’s not either/or; some places are more amenable than others. Iraq was working out well in 2009, when I left. Afghanistan was never going to work.
However the dilemma is false. There was both a secret deal with Iran, and stupidity in the leadership on this point at least.
In terms of the general philosophical puzzle you are asking about, though, I always cite this article to explain the view I find plausible:
https://securitystudies.org/fourth-quadrant-foreign-policy/
Basically I think there are both material and formal considerations, which interact. One of the things Marx was almost right about is that human values and material conditions are linked (he said the material determines the moral, but that’s not right). If you could travel back to Medieval Europe, you might find many people who were persuadable that human equality and freedom were correct views; especially among serfs! But the society couldn’t dispose of unfree labor no matter how many you convinced. In order to survive in its material conditions, they needed most people to work as agricultural labor; and they couldn’t afford to pay enough for it to be voluntary because there was little wealth. Once you have tractors and other machines, liberty becomes possible (and thus maybe you can get it).
If the material conditions are in place, then and only then can you work on alignment of values. As the article examines, in some cultures like ours the values align in a way that is self-reinforcing. In others, the liberal values would work against each other. As you achieve success convincing some to go along with the project, the success in the long term has to do with the issue of how aligned the values are and/or how open they are to adopting new values.
The only glimmer of an idea I have is economic and intellectual/religious freedom combined with vigorous communal opposition to theft and violence.
Also important, to the point of being Critical Items, are a generally informed, if not formally educated, population who have a generations-long history (and so tradition) of objecting to overly tyrannous governments and of taking relevant physical action against it.
That strikes me as one of the obvious differences, for instance, between our Revolution and the French one that was roughly contemporaneous. The Colonials had that information and that tradition; the French did not. As a result, while (as some folks have suggested, not so wrongly, that the difference was that we wanted to adjust who would govern us and how while the French wanted to tear down the system) our Revolutionaries had a pretty clear idea of what they were about, all the French Revolutionaries knew was "not these guys or this way."
That also illustrates, I think, why successful revolutions are so rare on the spectrum of revolution/revolt/overthrow/coup. Most efforts to materially change governments involuntarily fail miserably.
Though it's also true that the more money available, the easier it is to engage in, at least what works out to, moral behavior. (And to engage in, at least what works out to, amoral or immoral behavior.)
Eric Hines
Arabia and persia are mostly under dark gods. America was the bastion of the light gods.
It is the elohim and connection to source that brings enlightenment. Military arms are merely the human best tool in grade.
Strangely, i do not think of bush 2 as a puppet or bad guy. Even though i know many clasified amd de classifird de briefs that few had in 2003.
That is because american incursion into arab land is necessary to begin the change. This is a strategy at source creation, abovr the light and dark. Both are limited and incomplete.
The difference was simple. Jefferson and franklin were wanderers. You can think of them as upper echelon agents sent by the creator. They were here to break the system by creating a new yimeline possibility.
Many generations are needed.
To see the difference between divine planning and human planning, we have petraeus vs satan.
Satan puts hussein in power over usa, creating the abomination of desolation.
Petraeus cleans up iraq using locals.
Is satan dumber than petraeus? Not particularly.
So yes, i knew in 2008 that iraq was doomed in the short run. Because amis had new face. However, sayingit will help make it reality. Quantum manifestation.
The temporal paradox problem is also large for entities seeing future. A lot of the prophevies are wrong becauseworld lines changed based on free will.
To undersfand this requires heisenberg s uncertainty principle and the double slit issue. Both are nearly paradoxes.
Being descended from NW Europeans seems to help. I suppose that may be what you just said. High trust, high cooperation, low tolerance for internal violence, greater equality by class, sex, and religion, individual rights, rule of law. Not as simple as it looks, when you consider the whole list.
We did install democracy by occupation, in Germany and Japan. It is interesting to think why that was. I have several conflicting answers to that.
As to winning a war...The time to be merciful is after victory. Then, as you wish. Mercy depends on justice for its existence, it cannot precede it.
We did install democracy by occupation, in Germany and Japan. It is interesting to think why that was. I have several conflicting answers to that.
Some of it was they were abjectly defeated, and the populace was legitimately sick of war. In Japan, we didn't try to force the issue with the Emperor (which WOULD have been a problem, and we likely would have seen insurgencies had we tried to). We also didn't have internal political divisions demanding we pull out of either nation precipitously. And I don't even think the Soviets did much at first to undermine our democracy building in either country. And that one surprised me to consider until I realized that they were busy "Communism building" in Eastern Europe, and that they had a vested interest that we not let either country backslide into fascism again. Iran never had such qualms.
Also, unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, there were no neighboring countries hiding the ethnically indistinguishable insurgents like Iran, Syria and Pakistan. All in all, comparisons between the GWoT and WWII are pretty much doomed to fail.
Also important, to the point of being Critical Items, are a generally informed, if not formally educated, population... The Colonials had that information and that tradition; the French did not. As a result, while (as some folks have suggested, not so wrongly, that the difference was that we wanted to adjust who would govern us and how while the French wanted to tear down the system) our Revolutionaries had a pretty clear idea of what they were about, all the French Revolutionaries knew was "not these guys or this way."
The other side of that coin is Marxist revolution, which is always led by formally educated people with a very clear idea of where they're going. They also have a highly developed theory of change that is carefully inculcated into the revolutionary population.
So by themselves education and clear ideas aren't sufficient. Some ideas match the world better than others.
The Americans did not install democracy in Germany and Japan. Those two situations are completely different from each other and modern Arabia, and for the same reason Americans don't even know anything about Operation Paperclip because of Rockefeller's textbooks covering up US WW2 shenanigans.
Both Germany and japan had negative human leaders but also positive human leaders. What changed them, to make it a short story, was compassion, love, and forgiveness, as well as a more negative rejection of nationalism/war mongering.
Notable events are the LDS potato project sending food to Germans, from Belgium.
The Japanese are a subject matter of which I am more than a bit familiar with, but as a result, their situation is even more complicated. Suffice it to say that an entire generation or two, under Emperor Hirohito, grew up rejecting the "Asia Prosperity Sphere" idea that Japan was going to liberate all of East Asia from Western colonialism, because they see it as just a military junta that went against the Divine Authority of Japan's Imperial line.
Dying for their Divine Emperor, lineage of Amaterasu, and dying for some military nationalistic Junta... those are completely different things to the WW2 Japanese.
Petraeus was well on his way to paving the ground conditions in Iraq to be more loving, more compassionate, and thus more spiritually aligned to the light gods than the dark gods. Which is why the Cabal in America took action. Why would Demoncrats be paid and ordered to keep harping that Iraq cannot become a democracy? Because they were using a ritual manifestation power. They were told to block it, even though they had no real idea of what they were blocking.
As for Germany, Russia took the East because of FDR, and the Allies took the West.
West vs East, in metaphysics and in micro/macro power scales.
Russian might have been trying for taking over Japan as well in a similar scenario, but Truman blocked that with the A bomb and got help from Hirohito, when MacArthur decided not to prosecute Hirohito for war crimes (as Winston Churchill and other Alliance leaders were out for blood on). The Nuremburg Trials made it morally impermissible to think of the Axis cause as "good" or "tolerable" or even human. Of course, that human institution has no power over me or the Divine. The inability to look at things from the lose's point of view is why Americans found Iraq so puzzling, since they at least had some idea that they had accomplished something in the past. They accomplished nothing other than be the conduit for the power of love and compassion to change human cultures. High IQ Americans know that Iraq and Afghanistan has a culture problem. What they don't know is that it is the gods that create and change cultures. American Pesidential election tems are a bit too near sighted for that project.
Germany became publically enemy number 1, to this day people still use the term "Nazi" as a catch all group for any human rival that they want to label as anti or non human. That is because it is due to repression. Because they have repressed considering the enemy's point of view in WW2, they have also repressed and suppressed any knowledge or awareness of Russian/American involvement in the spoils of WW2: the Nazi scientists and technological progress generated through those "inhumane" experiments.
So how is it Nuremburg made Nazi craft untenable, yet America nand Russian technology now becomes based on these Nazi scientific experiments and knowledge?
Because the Nazis were aided by the dark gods and those of more positive orientation. This eventually became something more serious to Reagan and Eisenhower as they began to see the global powe ramifications.
America is spiritually, the capital of the Cabal.
Consider what this means, given the Cabal's chief source of infamy are child pedo rings and human trafficking.
Union: We ended slavery by killing a whole bunch of Ameicans.
Oh really?
Southern Confederates: We fought for our state sovereignty.
Oh really?
If Americans ended slavey... why is there more slavery now? Pretty sure women and children make up collectively more than 50% of your population, America. Or maybe they, like black livestock, matters about as much as cows.
If Southern Scots/Irish fought for their sovereignty and rights, why did the slave master aristocrats that had political and economic power, not fight in the war they led? It sounds more like Scots/Irish were the "white" cannonfodder of the elites, who were themselves pawns to foreign powers.
The gods have been fighting over who controls and influences America for awhile now, ever since the beginning and before.
The term "gods" doesn't even capture the situation accurately, as there is a hiearchy of power and wisdom, to which includes the Divine Counsel. There is a "top" per say, but most entities belong to the middle.
Russia Passes Bill Allowing Putin to Stay in Power Past 2024 https://www.theepochtimes.com/russia-passes-bill-allowing-putin-to-stay-in-power-past-2024_3267934.html
Democracy in russia does not look like america. Looks like fdr.
There is a good reason for putin to do this. America briefed russia on the deep statr handlers. The russian bear is gearing for ww3 but not against ukraine or us but against the dark gods. This scares the p out of even the russie cossacks that know.
So democracy was never as clean as amis thought. Even for this last election admin of usa.
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