There's Democracy, and There's an Oil Pipeline NYTimes 5/29

[Coastie for Truth]

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/29/weekinreview/29sanger.html

Samuel Bodman, the new secretary of energy, led the United States delegation to Azerbaijan last week to celebrate a huge moment in America's effort to diversify its sources of oil: The opening of a pipeline that will carry Caspian oil to the West, on a route that avoids Russia and Iran.

Mr. Bodman delivered a message from President Bush: "As Azerbaijan deepens its democratic and market economic reforms, this pipeline can help generate balanced economic growth, and provide a foundation for a prosperous and just society that advances the cause of freedom."

Just a few days earlier, the Azerbaijani police beat pro-democracy demonstrators with truncheons when opposition parties, yelling "free elections," defied the government's ban on protests against President Ilham Aliyev. Mr. Aliyev is one of President Bush's allies in the war on terror, even though he won a highly suspect election to succeed his father, a former Soviet strongman.

Every week, the White House seems to find itself in a balancing act between promoting democracy, on one hand, and supporting friends in combustible but strategically important parts of the world. In recent days, the issue has been how hard to press for an international inquiry into the massacre of civilians in Uzbekistan this month; or how to press Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, into facing real challengers in his country's coming election; or how to challenge the resurgence of central control in Russia and China while gaining their cooperation to stop nuclear proliferation.


<snip> -- long article - follow the link http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/29/weekinreview/29sanger.html

Another hell hole - worse then the former Yugoslavia, worse then the former Mesopotamia (Iraq), or the former Persia (Iran), or Israel-Pakistan.

My grand dad was a conscript in the Czarist military of occupation nd subjugation there - and he characterized it as an ungovernable hell hole - 120 years ago.

[acmejack]

1. They're members of the coalition though!

These dictators we're (using the imperial "we") supporting are really getting me down.

On an unrelated note Coastie, what rate were you? Did you serve on any WHECs? Knew many of you folks, all STs.

[rodeodance]

4. the WH fear-"you will get Muslim governments there."

..........Paul Goble, an expert on the former Soviet Union who used to work for the State Department, summarized the conundrum in the region this way: "As soon as you get rid of the ex-Communist thugs, you will get Muslim governments there."

That is one reason Mr. Bush takes every chance to highlight the success stories, even at the risk of offending Russia.

Mr. Bush's aides describe him as deeply engaged in the strategy, down to choosing exactly where he would go on his five-nation trip earlier this month. On that trip, the president spoke from the square in Tbilisi where Georgians staged demonstrations that ousted a leader in 2003. The warning he was sending to Vladimir V. Putin of Russia about centralizing power in the Kremlin was clear, if never explicitly stated.

But Mr. Goble remembers how thinly democracy was consolidated in the region after the Berlin Wall fell, despite American wishes. "Our tendency is to declare victory and move on," he said. "It doesn't work that way."

[Dover]

2. Yeah, we should create 'vacation packages' for U.S. fundies to these areas

so they can fully experience the life they are promoting in the U.S.

What is life without liberals really like? Without dissent? Without freedom to choose? An authoritarian regime?

[SHRED]

3. Corporate interests

They always trump Democratic interests.
Amazing how the brain-dead bushies still rally around the "spreading freedom" bullshit.
Just shows how much our educational systems and media have failed us.

[rodeodance]

5. a former WH staff --democracy should not be controlling issue.

He is right--freedom and democracy seem to trump everything now.


I...t all has shades of the cold war. From 1946 until the fall of the Berlin Wall, American presidents embraced - sometimes unhappily, sometimes enthusiastically - dictators from Latin America to the Philippines to South Korea in the name of stopping Communism.

Now, even brutal leaders have discovered that if they cooperate in the war on terror Washington is unlikely to squeeze them too hard, or at least too publicly, on other issues. Pakistan has led in this strategy. When President Pervez Musharraf decided late last year not to relinquish his military posts, as he had once promised to do, no one from the White House denounced him.

The president and his aides have never said it would be easy to reconcile Mr. Bush's clarion call for democratic change worldwide with reality on the ground. But at least one past member of the administration says they have made a basic mistake.

"Look, I was part of the incubation of this policy," said Richard N. Haass, who was head of policy planning in the State Department from 2001 to 2003, referring to the decision to make democracy a major theme of the Bush presidency. "But I don't think you can make it the controlling issue. The administration has set itself up for inconsistency." In fact, Mr. Bush has started to talk about the need for patience as Americans wait for democracy to take hold elsewhere. His wife, Laura, took up the theme this month on a trip to the Middle East. Asked about the difficulties of mounting any real challenge to President Mubarak in Egypt, she said, "To act like you can just go from here to there overnight is naïve." Full democracy, she said, is "not easy and we know that it's, in many cases, not even possible."
................

[thereismore]

6. Bush* cannot say one sentence without "freedom" or "liberty"

it's sickening. Who is buying it? He should stick to his dog and pony show, he seems to have memorized some one-liners.

[Gregorian]

7. Isn't it sickening?

Without the Fourth Estate (media), he's fooling nearly half the country. One person I met this week says they'd vote for him again, because "He's a man of action". Yesterday the pastor from my town came by to look for a tombstone on the graveyard on my property. He got to talking. And I could tell he was full of coolaid. Every fear we have has come true. It is more than a nightmare.
Slowly, it's coming around. But not after they've done great great damage.