Ladas wrote:
Diamondeye wrote:
The fact that Arabs view Israel and the US as major threats in the region reveals that the US leadership hates democracy?
His position isn't quite as simple as it was distilled at the top of the article, though I think his point would be better expressed by saying the propagation of democracy around the world is not the primary concern of the US government, despite its claims, and is at best a secondary consideration to US concerns.
Of course, the US isn't a democracy anyway.
It isn't, but everyone else uses "democracy" as shorthand for "system where voting by the people is involved in some way or other" and we've already beaten that semantic nitpick to death.
In any case, his complaint even clarified as you have only illustrates that the man is either anive to the point of being a total fool, or an unbridled hypocrite and propigator of double standards. Of course the primary concern of the U.S. is not propagating democracy. The primary goal of the U.S. is doing what's good for the U.S. In many cases that does, in fact, mean promoting "democracy" (or Republics or whatever), but it's a means, not an end.
Of course, every other country promotes its own interests as well. The difference in that the U.S. is a large country in both land area and population (3rd in the world in both categories) and hugely powerful economically despite current woes (by virtue of simply being large it has a huge influence ont he world economy regardlesss of what that influence currently is).
It's just a cute way of saying "If you're a large nation, it's perfectly ok to be critical of larger nations or take action against them for not being altruistic in their motives, but if you're a large nation, it's not ok to be critical of smaller nations or take action against them." It's not a complaint about U.S. behavior in and of itself, it's a complaint about the
fact that the U.S. is doing it for no better reason than the fact that the U.S. is powerful and the fact that he thinks for some reason the U.S. should be perfect in living up to the political ideals expressed in what is essentially the propaganda reason for its actions (not propaganda in the Jospeh Gobbels sense, but propaganda in the sense that we're taking the good-sounding means of promoting "democracy" and making it sound like it's actually the goal in our rhetoric).
What's more is, you won't find him cricticizing other large and/or powerful nations for their behavior; some exception or reason why they're "not as bad" will always be put forth.
The man is the living embodiment of anti-U.S. hypocrisy; not because the cricticisms are necessarily factually inaccurate (some are, some aren't) but because U.S. behaviors are castigated at length often with total disregard for the circumstances they occured under, while every other nations' beahior except Israel gets excuses made for it.
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