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2004-04-28 Home Front: Culture Wars
What should be the U.S. goal in Iraq?
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Posted by tipper 2004-04-28 6:58:38 AM|| || Front Page|| [2 views since 2007-05-07]  Top

#1 whoa! He's from Harvard? How'd he slip through the cracks?
Posted by B 2004-04-28 8:54:15 AM||   2004-04-28 8:54:15 AM|| Front Page Top

#2 I also find myself between the later two. The experience in Iraq will probably tip the scales one way or the other on whether the world is worth saving from itself.
Posted by ruprecht 2004-04-28 10:02:09 AM||   2004-04-28 10:02:09 AM|| Front Page Top

#3 I think the later two are Rantburgian.
Posted by Lucky 2004-04-28 12:06:31 PM||   2004-04-28 12:06:31 PM|| Front Page Top

#4 "The U.S. goal cannot be a free Iraq, but an Iraq that does not endanger Americans." This is a narrow view of the goal. The ultimate goal is to defeat the radical Islamists who are the purveyors of world wide terrorism. Sure, one more immediate goal of the Iraq operation was to remove the threat posed by Traq through Saddam. But a free Iraq is poison to the radical Islamists, and the tenacity of their current insurging in Iraq is because they know what a free Iraq will mean to their movement. Their efforts to abort a free Iraq before it happens is testament that the Bush strategy is correct. So the goal should be a free Iraq, because this facilitates the defeat of the radical Islamists which will make all of us more secure.
Posted by Sam 2004-04-28 12:29:02 PM||   2004-04-28 12:29:02 PM|| Front Page Top

#5 "The U.S. goal cannot be a free Iraq, but an Iraq that does not endanger Americans." That's a reasonable fall-back position. A bare minimum goal. Why not aim higher, why not make sure the entire region does not endanger Americans?
Posted by ruprecht 2004-04-28 1:15:21 PM||   2004-04-28 1:15:21 PM|| Front Page Top

#6 Imperial: America reshapes the world. This impulse is fueled by a belief in “the supremacy of American power and the universality of American values.” America’s unique military, economic, and cultural might bestows on it the responsibility to confront evil and to order the world. Other peoples are assumed basically to share the same values as Americans;


No - they differ on many values, but DO share certain universal aspirations.

Americans should help them attain those values. America is less a nation than “the dominant component of a supranational empire.”
No - America is a nation that is endangered in a global world, when many nations lag behind.

· National: “America is different” and its people recognize and accept what distinguishes them from others. That difference results in large part from the country’s religious commitment and its Anglo-Protestant culture.
The nationalist outlook preserves and enhances those qualities that have defined America from its inception. As for people who are not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, they “become Americans by adopting its Anglo-Protestant culture and political values.”

The anglo Protestant culture has been shaped and reformed in many ways, to some extent by the cultures of immigrants, but in larger ways by the land itself, and the unique experience of living in this land. So more properly we should speak of adopting to the broader American culture, and dont need to focus on the anglo protestant aspects of it, though theyre certainly there. And of course immigrants today ARE adapting to American culture - well hispanic immigrants certainly are (i wont touch at this point on the hot button of Muslim immigration)

And the most important point, for strategy, is that the POLITICAL VALUES we espouse are widely held beyond the anglo Protestant world. Sam Huntington, IIRC, was skeptical of democracy succeeding in Mediterranean Europe, for crying out loud (anyone else have the "privilege" of reading him in the 1970's?) Democracy wont work in Latin America, in the Eastern Orthodox world, etc. Anyone who thinks Sam is an advocate for the view that "the muslim world is uniquely unequipped for democracy" has it wrong. He things anyplace outside the western european civ (although now im getting confused, i thought France and Germany and Norway and so forth WERENT anglo, and France and Italy werent Protestant) is incapable of democracy. Of course when youre propounding a "realist" view of Latin American politics, or raising alarums about Hispanic immmigration, I suppose you need to blur some of those "civilizational" definitions.
Posted by Liberalhawk 2004-04-28 4:04:38 PM||   2004-04-28 4:04:38 PM|| Front Page Top

#7 Glad we have a house optimist.
Posted by Shipman 2004-04-28 5:28:57 PM||   2004-04-28 5:28:57 PM|| Front Page Top

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