The Means Justify the Ends
Different Strings recently had a piece on means and ends. It's a subject I've been thinking about lately myself.
When you think about it, founding your country on democratic principles is the ultimate statement that you believe the means justify the ends. Everybody votes, and as long as democratic procedure is followed, then the results are law. It follows that letting the ends justify the means is inherrently undemocratic, and therefore unAmerican.
Right now, we are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to the future of Iraq. We are a country founded on democratic principles, and the Bush administration says they want to bring democracy to Iraq. But the problem is that they hate us. Well, that may be a bit too harsh. Let me put it this way: true democratic means employed in Iraq today would probably beget ends which run counter to our national interests (or at the very least, counter to the Bush administration's interests, which might happen to coincide with our national interests for once).
This is one of the many reasons that so many people did not support Mr. Bush's war on Iraq: What to do with the peace? As much as I felt for the Iraqi people under Mr. Hussein's boot, is our government truly commited to make their lives better? Are we going to actually bring democracy, or is the administration just going to install neoliberal economics and a new dictator whom they can control, and call it democracy? Unfortunately, the concequences of either of these scenarios is likely to be more harmful to the US than if we had left Saddam in power. A better scenario would have been to get Saddam indicted for his human rights abuses in an international court, isolating him, delegitimizing him, and hopefully ousting him without a destabilizing war. But then we know how Bush &co. feel about international law.
7:32:06 AM 
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