What Hath The Shrubbery Wrought?
Kevin Hayden at American Street has a concise quiz on the recent history in the Persian Gulf. If you have personally experienced history since the election of Richard Nixon and were paying attention to current affairs it is rather depressing.
My older instructors at the Defense Language Institute were unhappy when I pointed out that from the standpoint of the average Russian peasant the Soviet era was an improvement over the tsarist era that preceded it. Peasants received education and health care under the Soviets that didn’t exist for them under the tsars. They were oppressed under both systems, so the political changes didn’t really affect them.
It’s a good thing Saddam isn’t getting a jury trial.
2 comments
“Peace! Bread! Land!”
I suppose Iraqis have land, but peace and bread aren’t so plentiful. And what good is land if you’re starving and face death every day? I suspect many Iraqis would welcome a Soviet-style system.
This is the problem of imposing democracy, rather than nurturing it: people who have never had it, don’t know what to do with it. Unfortunately demagogues do know how to use it and the results aren’t pretty.
This is why you don’t go in without a plan to get out.
People never learned or forget that one-third of the population of the thirteen colonies had no opinion either way about the Revolution, and we were ostensively ruled by a democratic country.