oh my
 

from today's NYT:darn White House and their ignorant, bigoted views.

I'm just curious, knife, but I wanna ask you what you think is the difference between westerners and middle easterners that makes us capable of fostering liberal democracies and them incapable of doing the same, considering it was the Muslims who preserved through the dark ages the history and writings of the classical philosophers who created democracy and republics. Is it something in the water?

well, i have no idea what the Muslims preserved centuries ago about democracy and republics, but if so, they have clearly chosen to live otherwise.

i suppose your question is a rhetorical device to showcase this bit of trivia, but i'll answer it anyway: at some point in a society that evolves into a republic or democracy, a people have to decide to put aside tribal and religious affiliations as thier primary allegiances in favor of allegiance to a common government. for whatever reason (and obviously there are many complex reasons why), most of the Middle East has not done that yet.

that's thier choice as a people and i take no issue with that - we're all responsible for our own destiny. i take issue with our decision to attempt to force them, by military occupation, to choose otherwise. i regard it as an unwise and impractical use of my country's limited resources.

It was not a rhetorical question, and thanks for answering. :)

I came across an article called Christianity, Islam, and Science today. Together with Wikipedia's article on the Islamic Golden Age it paints a picture of a Muslim world that could have entered into it's own Renaissance centuries before Europe, had circumstances been a little different. Muslims are demonstrably capable of practicing national-scale democracy, but it's only been in the last century that they've had the opportunity to try. Your doubts that military action will make them more liberal are reasonable, but your doubts that they are simply incapable of self governance probably aren't.

i don't think i ever said they are incapable of self-governance, per se, and if i did, it was a poor choice of words on my part. what i think said is that, under the current social structure of muslim society, they are incapable of Jeffersonian-style democracy.

edit: btw, i've also read that muslim society had produced many great leaps of scientific, technological, and intellectual advancement in it's heyday - obviously the potential is, or was, there for further greatness. what happened along the way to derail that progress, i have no idea, but i would suspect that it had something to do with the introduction of great oil wealth into the culture, and the subsequent consolidation of that wealth into the hands of particular groups (just a guess on my part,with no data to back it up). at any rate, here we are.