Iran creates international panic

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Not an un-word, Cicero... merely an inchoate unwillingness to accept it, and I'd say that's a problem you need to fix. Attaching prefixes is by no means illegitimate, as any seventh grade English teacher could confirm for you.

Dar, frankly, your reply contradicts itself from one paragraph to another. You say you're for reason, rationality, honesty and fair play, yet you want to object to the removal of rulerships and societies that refuse to do any of these things -- and are not these things what you are saying? Can't have it both ways, Dar old son.

Recognizing that, I don't have it both ways.

Our problems from foreign parts do not stem from democracies or constitutional monarchies. They come from one kind of source -- places where the rule of men supercedes the rule of law. Can you think of any place that gives us trouble that isn't that way? We don't shoot at democracies, nor they at us. For over a century, every fight we've fought has been against undemocracies. Every single one. I'd say we're in the habit.

You think you're going to show we're doing something else? Man, you've got a pile of work ahead of you, and even if you manage it, it's likely I can make one observation about your giant, antidemocratic effort that will pull the whole construct down like a Jenga tower.

For instance, it's clear you still believe we "rushed into war" in the Iraq campaign. I guess the only way you can sustain that belief is if you read no recent history whatsoever, at any time, for the remainder of your life. I dunno; reading history makes a pretty good hobby, it seems to me. The eighteen-month span of September 2001 to March 2003 hardly looks like anybody was in a big hurry to war, and there were all those UN Resolutions both passed and sought, plus Saddam's government's pattern of guilty behavior. The Ba'athist neofascists don't seem to have been smart enough to run a country... nondemocracies don't select for clearheaded intelligence the way democracies do.

The guy who believes the Iraq campaign in the overall GWOT was a lamebrained mistake is a man without any strategic understanding. We are undermining the whole terrorist bully-the-West rationale, by handing them defeat upon defeat, and having the backs of the peoples who are turning slowly but steadily against the Taliban and their brutality, against the shitheads and their terrorism. With every Muslim head they lop off, they chop away their own support. Since the Taliban are so generally recognized as mean shitheads, which is better: defeat them this year, or defeat them forty years from now? Should one put up with mean shitheads for the span of a generation?

I say this year is best. Vigorous elimination of the radical anti-Americans is not only good for us specifically, but is generally good for all of humanity, as a moment's thought will show you. Had you really, honestly never thought about it that way?

If there is any wrongness in removing undemocracy and replacing it with democracy, absolutely no one has been able to explain it. Dar, I'll be frank: a few people on this very Cellar have tried. None have been convincing, all of them were in error. They ended up trying to defend oppression, and failing to liberate the oppressed. This is a particular failing of the Left and the left-of-center, to the point where it is clear these people wouldn't recognize goodness or righteousness if it bit their leg off. The Left whores for oppression and undemocracy, and for that reason it should be abandoned by every human on earth, and left solely the province of the utterly inhuman, who then get jailed and executed for their other heinous crimes.

I await your intellectually dishonest reply, and will in rebutting it show you a better path than has hitherto satisfied you.