How Not to Make Democracy

How Not to Make Democracy

Date 2014/7/9

Paris, July 9, 2014 -- Barring the increasingly influential Isolationist/Tea Party wing of the American electorate, opinion is and always has been that the United States is the messenger of democracy to a world that usually hasn’t earned it and probably doesn’t deserve it.

The Obama administration today includes two camps officially committed to the promulgation of democracy, one of them located in the State Department, CIA and Pentagon, willing to employ subversion, invasion, and fire and brimstone to accomplish regime change in politically backward nations in order to bestow upon them a better life, such as the United States knows.

Associated chiefly but not at all exclusively with the Republican Party and Republican presidencies, it has been responsible since the first Gulf War for American-led mayhem in the Middle East and West Asian Afghanistan and Pakistan. In addition, its enduring commitment in Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals has been to establish the primacy of NATO and indirect reign of the United States up to, or beyond, the frontiers of a weakened Russia.

With the election of Barack Obama this policy group was expected to lose influence, but this was a temporary phenomenon as the present internal struggle between east and west in Ukraine demonstrates, and the mounting pressure in Washington for American intervention in Syria and Iraq against the Islamic Caliphate that has been proclaimed to exist, straddling territories taken from both those countries. To this must be added alarm over China and the steady augmentation of the American military presence in Africa, in search of new democracy-building tasks — of which there are many.http://www.williampfaff.com/article.php?storyid=686