So, because Saddam was bad, the death and suffering inflicted on the Iraqi people was justified?
Saddam was terrible. But do you know who was worse? Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Saddam was terrible. But do you know who was worse? Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Also, in the tables of moral calculus, incompetence in pursuit of noble goals ("depose evil dictator and establish democracy") is significantly less offensive than overtly evil goals ("overthrow democracy and install kleptocracy that rules the natives at gunpoint").
But then if you saw enough autocratic regimes not doing these things, (Singapore?), could you be brought around to preferring autocracy?
What the fuck are you smoking? Are you arguing that there is no a priori reason to prefer democracy?
I suggest these definitions, but am open to revisions.
def: a government is the smallest set of people with a (almost) monopoly of force in a particular geographic region.
def: democracy is a government where the set size is at least 10% of the total number of people occupying the geographic region.
def: autocracy is government where the set size is one.
Presently, it is not clear to me how to make a persuasive and coherent a priori argument in favor of democracy. I believe you have a nomination for such an argument, please share.
There is no such thing as a true monopoly on force, since I require other people to fight for me. They could instead choose to do nothing, so I must always operate in this context. I won't speak to the full set of ways to accomplish it, but it seems clear that there are at least two.
In order to meaningfully be an autocrat, it must be possible for you to wield this force in a manner inconsistent with its own majority interests. If you do not maintain that power, you are de facto operating in a democracy.
This is a real downside to running an autocracy. The autocrat now forever engaged in a game of don't-let-the-balloon-touch-the-floor, and the cost is that for every gun you want pointed at your personal objective, you have to point a gun at the person holding the gun you want pointed and so on. As you can imagine, this is expensive and fragile, since there are, by an absolute law of mathematics, fewer guns at the top than the bottom, and you have to possess a lot more guns than if you didn't need to point guns at the people actually executing the force. Technology can lower the number of guns you need to point in between layers in order to reach pseudo-stability, but never to zero, and there is always a risk that the force will figure out how to organize in its own interests and depose you.
There is another way, of course, in which the organizational structure of the military is designed around ensuring that its aggregate interests are met, including the meta interest of maintaining that property. This is roughly identifiable as democracy, and it should be clear that the difference between this case and the previous one is qualitative, which makes it a much more sensible way of drawing a line between the two governments.
I still claim that this is a bad definition of government.
Do you think that most Iraqi people were pro-Saddam or against him?
Everyone from Henry Kissinger to Joe Biden is on record saying NATO expansion would lead to a confrontation with Russia.
As for Iraq, it takes a special kind of wilful ignorance to think that deposing a strongman, leaving a power vaccum and excluding the existing power structure would lead to anything but chaos.
> Do you think that most Iraqi people were pro-Saddam or against him?
Either the people of Iraq supported Saddam, in which case the justification of liberating Iraq was BS. Or the majority did not support Saddam, in which case there is absolutely no justification for the suffering inflicted on them.
Russia has to beat into submission so it is no longer a threat. Just like it was done with Germany in WW2, Stalin did get away from that.
Being different from that is exactly not the point.
Well, that ship sailed thankfully and Russia can expect a strong fist from those countries. Hitler and WW2 Germany had smaller negative impact on those countries than Soviet Russia.
> Either the people of Iraq supported Saddam, in which case the justification of liberating Iraq was BS. Or the majority did not support Saddam, in which case there is absolutely no justification for the suffering inflicted on them.
In fact it's the second one, Shia were a repressed majority. But how would the first justify their suffering? Saddam had nothing to do with 911.
The Sunnis dominated the country politically and militarily, until the Americans took out their army in 1991 and established autonomy for the Kurds, and finally deposed Saddam in 2003.