FOLLOWUP ON YESTERDAY'S BLOG

The fallout from the Khashoggi assassination continues to dominate the news. Turkey’s President calls for the return of the suspected Saudis to stand trial since it occurred on Turkish soil although inside the Saudi Consulate. The Saudis story keeps changing and PONTUS seems to have accepted the Crown Prince’s lack of involvement a fact rather than give up a potential military deal which he considers more morally important than disregard for human life.

Yesterday I had written:” If facts were acknowledged at no time has our support of a dictator produce a “democracy”, instead when we stopped supporting some form of a democratic society gradually emerged.”  And referred to a Washington Post opinion article on 10/22 by Robert Kagan.

Anonymous had sent a response:” Doc... If some sort of Democratic Society emerged from abandoned Dictatorships your comment would be valid. Sadly, many populations that emerge become victims of a less desirable subsequent Dictatorships. or, fragment into diverse competing groups which results in internecine conflict. Sometime that conflict is exported around the world. Not every population is ready for democracy. Look at what happened when our CIA was complicit in toppling the Shah of Iran. The Saudis area bulwark against the expansive objectives of Iran the sponsor of turmoil and terrorism. These are not black and white situations.”

I felt that his example was not accurate. True the Shah had a repressive dictatorship that was modernism his country. I was in Iran the year before he fell and outwardly life was good. The USA had several military establishments there to support the equipment the Shah had bought.

Our relationship was unfortunately in supporting a dictator against Soviet influence. But there was no physical intervention.  Nor were we “complicit” in the Shah’s overthrow Indeed when the Shah fell he was succeeded by a more restrictive religious autocracy dominated by the Ayatollah, dictatorship. That of course led to the siege of the US Embassy.

As to my contention that love of and support of “progressive” dictatorships is counter-productive to the production of democratism in those countries I refer to the following from Kagan’s article: “During the 1920s and 1930s, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin and even Adolf Hitler looked to many Americans like just what their countries needed to get them into shape. During the Cold War, leaders including the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, Iran’s Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, South Korea’s Park Chung-hee and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet took turns as the United States’ favorite “modernizing” dictators. In the post-Cold War era, the Chinese dictatorship has gained many Americans’ admiration for its smooth handling of the country’s economy

Justifying all this sympathy for the dictator have been variations on what used to be called “modernization theory.” Developing societies, the argument ran, had to move through an authoritarian stage before they could become democracies, for both economic and political reasons. Only authoritarian governments could be trusted to make the right economic decisions, unhampered by popular pressures for inflationary and deficit-raising spending.

Communist governments were the ones that undertook reforms that led to their unraveling and a turn to democracy, however feeble. Meanwhile, authoritarianism persisted in the Middle East and elsewhere, except where the United States did withdraw support, as in the Philippines, South Korea and Chile; only at that point did they become democracies.”

The point is that authoritarian governments will eventually fail on their own and be succeeded by some form of democracy when the country is ready. Democracy cannot be forced on anybody.