Start Behaving as if Facts Really Do Matter
Believe it or not, I hate politics. Political discourse in this nation has become self serving and infantile. We employ such international foreign polices as "the snub" and the "cold shoulder". We begin financial blockages that effect lower classes more than their foreign governments while hoping to buy the public hearts and minds of foreign nations, which usually turn out to be, and not surprisingly, not for sale.
Have sanctions worked anywhere? Or have they been a huge part of the problem perpetually faced by America? Historically we can see that whenever a nation is hard pressed economically it becomes more aggressive, not more "compliant". This, in fact, gave the Nazis their beginning, people were sick and tired of paying overly burdensome reparations for WWI, and refusing to continue to pay and regaining economic prosperity became a major selling point for Nazism. And of course they did improve their economy. They did so first by stealing Jewish wealth, and then by turning to a war machine economy. They simply used the hard times for their own political purposes.
No serious student of history would miss this fact, that impoverished nations often turn to hostilities, whether it's revolution within or wars of aggression waged upon foreign nations. What do you want to bet that this administration, ostensibly run by this nation's war industry, understands that fact very well. Sanctions, in theory, would either undermine sovereign governments which were not "compliant" to American demands, and if not would be the tinder for future wars, a win-win situation for the war industry. Quite often, dictators come into power by promising to make their nation's economies better, and by resisting the demands of bullying foreign nations, just as Hitler did. It is a legitimate populist position to take, and sometimes rising leaders really mean what they say with regard to helping their people. Other times they simply lie in order to gain power. Either way, that nations will be starved into compliance with the demands of foreigners not only doesn't work, it destabilizes entire regions of the world.
It's a wonder to much of the world that America somehow deems itself worthy of dictating to other nations their demands for "compliance", when international diplomacy has always rested upon the notion that sovereign governments should be self determined, whether or not they become dictatorships or democracies. And since the CIA has been known to overthrow democracies and install "compliant" dictatorships (see Encarta), we shouldn't be preaching, quite hypocritically, our wishes to "make the world safe for democracy".
We have already proven again and again that we haven't the moral authority to do so because we are as likely to support dictatorships that serve our interests as democracies.
Perhaps the reason that political discourse in our nation begins to sound so infantile is that our politicians seem to be incapable of remembering history, or consulting with sociological studies, as if they are somehow magically above such things. But you know the saying, those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it. Which is why we find ourselves in even worse constitutional circumstances now than in Nixonian times. The enemies of our Constitution didn't forget their lessons, rather they chose to learn from them. Some of them worked for Nixon in his time.
America has failed in too many ways to count. Torture doesn't make people servile, it makes them enemies for life with nothing left to loose. Being "tough on crime" only makes lifetime criminals and makes as many problems as it attempts to resolve. If only America would stop with it's childishness and begin to embrace facts instead of knee jerk reactionism we would be a far better, and a far more respectable nation. Somebody please tell these politicians that spoiled little rich boy socialite efforts of diplomacy are not diplomacy at all. This nation needs to keep it's lines of communications open. And the more that we do so, the less we will have to depend on cooked intelligence estimates, rumors, forged documentation, and people like Curveball. That, because enough people will know the other side of the story to say to an administration "Not so fast".
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