People want security and order before democracy

As we also see in Russia these days

The great tragic failure in Iraq has been political failure, not military failure. At the heart of that failure have been two lofty notions - "nation-building" and democracy.

Nations cannot be built. You can transplant institutions from one country to another, but you cannot transplant the history and culture from which the attitudes and traditions evolved that enable those institutions to work. It took centuries for democracy to evolve in the Western world. Yet we tried to create democracy in Iraq before we created the security - the law and order - that is a prerequisite for any form of viable government.

Having made democracy the centerpiece of the reconstruction of postwar Iraq, Americans have been hamstrung by the inadequacies of that government and the fact that our military could not simply ignore the Iraqi government when its politicians got in the way of restoring law and order.

People will support tyranny before they will support anarchy. Both can be avoided by creating an interim government based on competence, rather than on its being an embodiment of democratic ideals.

Neither in Europe nor in Asia did today's democracies begin as democracies. As late as 1950, no one could have called Taiwan or South Korea democracies. Even today, Singapore does not have the kind of freedom that Westerners regard as democratic. But it is a decent and prosperous society, vastly superior in every way to what it was at the end of World War II.

Trying to create democracy in places where it has never existed - and where the prerequisites for democracy may not exist - has been a needless gamble. Among those prerequisites are a toleration of different views, an accommodation of different interests, and a willingness to put the national interest above one's own. The Middle East is the last place to look for such qualities. Such things evolved in the West only after centuries of different religions and peoples trying unsuccessfully to destroy each other.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Author claims anti-war groups gave material support to terrorists: "A New York Times best-selling author says members of the supposed "peace movement" delivered hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and supplies to terrorists engaged in a bloody street battle against United States Marines in Iraq. The latest book by Lt. Col. Robert "Buzz" Patterson (U.S. Air Force-Ret.) is called War Crimes: The Left's Campaign to Destroy Our Military and Lose the War on Terror. In the book, he claims that two anti-war groups -- "United for Peace & Justice" and "CODEPINK: Women for Peace" -- literally gave aid and comfort to terrorists when they delivered $600,000 in cash and supplies they claim was humanitarian aid to civilians. According to Patterson, Congressman Henry Waxman (D-California) facilitated the transaction for CODEPINK by signing a letter allowing them to get the cash and supplies into Fallujah."

According to the media, good news about America is always bad news: "On July 12, the Standard & Poor's 500 Index and the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at record highs. The stock market saw its largest gain in nearly four years. But ABC and CBS placed the emphasis on negative symptoms of the economy, a "slumping" housing market and high gas prices. "There are still some dark clouds looming over this market," said Harris. "The housing market is in a slump, interest rates are rising and gas prices are ticking back up."

Want Fries With That?: "French people are not against McDonald's. They are against the Bush administration," Jose Bove, the radical farmer and French presidential candidate, said in an interview. How, HOW do you get to the point where you make something as meaningless as a retail outlet that is a vast sanitary improvement over the cruddy corner "Sandwicherie" an object of "philosophical" discussions, a bit of shorthand for a nation five times as populous that they refuse to understand, and a dagger of the mind? Easy. Have an empty life, nothing to say, and let a unexplainable cancerous well of envy grow inside you that you actively ignore.

More BBC crookedness: "The British Broadcasting Corporation suspended all phone-in and interactive contests on Wednesday after an investigation exposed several incidents in which competition winners were faked. The BBC, which has been battered by revelations about rigged contests and doctored footage, said an internal inquiry had found that "a small number of production staff ... have passed themselves off as viewers and listeners" on radio and TV shows. BBC Director-General Mark Thompson said six new cases had been uncovered in addition to a previously known incident involving the children's TV show "Blue Peter". "We must now swiftly put our house in order," he said. Thompson said phone-in contests on radio and TV would cease from midnight and internet competitions would be taken down as soon as possible. [Leftists destroy anything they touch. Destruction is the real aim behind their "compassionate" facade. They have certainly destroyed the respect in which the BBC was once held]

It's the Left who are dumb: "I think that President Bush has got one thing very much right, which is that Arab-Islamic terrorism is a symptom that something is rotten in the Middle East. If anything, his failures in Iraq and Palestine are due to underestimating the degree of rot. For all the allegations of his lack of intellect, George Bush is a brainiac compared to people who want to see terrorism as a symptom of something rotten in the United States or Israel."

The Saudi menace: "Although Bush administration officials frequently have lashed out at Syria and Iran for helping the insurgents and militias who attack U.S. troops and civilians here, the largest number of foreign fighters and suicide bombers in Iraq come from a third next-door neighbor, Saudi Arabia, according to a senior U.S. military officer and Iraqi lawmakers. The U.S. military believes 45 percent of all foreign militants are Saudi, another 15 percent are from Syria and Lebanon and 10 percent from North Africa, according to official U.S. military figures released to the Los Angeles Times by the officer. Nearly half the 135 foreigners held in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq are Saudi. Saudi fighters are thought to have carried out more suicide bombings than any other nationality, said the senior American military officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject's sensitivity for the U.S. government. He added that 50 percent of all Saudi fighters here are suicide bombers. In the last six months, such bombings have killed or injured 4,000 Iraqis."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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