AEU                    Are Bush and Blaire being naive?

Yes, I believe they are.  I don't think either of them are inherently bad men, but I think they are exercising the Law of Unintended Consequences to its limit.  Let me give you my thoughts, and if any reader believes I am wrong, call me on CDCNottm@AOL.com and tell me where you think my logic has failed.

Think about the British Empire and the Raj.  I was in India in 1947, so I have a little knowledge of the subject.  True; as a private soldier I wasn't into the workings of the Viceroy or any of his staff; I am simply deducing policy as I saw it being exercised.

In the eighteenth century the Brits did the same as the French and the Spanish, and we colonised a lot of the world.  None of the colonial powers did what they did for the benefit of the people whose country they invaded, they did it for pure profit as well as to safeguard themselves from their long-time enemies by having a presence in that part of the world.

All the colonial powers wanted markets for their goods, as the USA does today.  But I do seriously believe, the local people benefited from our presence.  In India, for example, Britain built the railways and the Post Office.  Does anyone seriously believe that the local rajahs and nabobs (nawabs) would have invested the sort of money that Britain did.  And we brought India into the nineteenth, and later, into the twentieth century.

Politicians then sprung up and wanted to run the country for themselves.  Some were naive in thinking that the people would be better off under local government (I think Ghandi and Nehru were two of those), and some (like Magabe in Zimbabwe) saw that there could be money to be made by getting the top job.

People all over the world seldom think things through.  What is their best interest?  Can they do the real things that they want to do by being ruled by an outsider, or do they fall for the rhetoric of local politicians who peddle patriotism.  Remember what Dr Johnson said about patriotism -- it is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Now back to the present time.  Blaire and Bush have the high ideal of  freedom for Iraq and Afghanistan (whatever 'freedom' means).  The Iraqis and the Afghans are just as naive as the Brits and Americans and believe in making their own mistakes.  How many Iraqi woman who were oppressed by their husbands, now have no breadwinner to oppress them?  They just become beggars.  Similar for Afghanistan.

We want to stop them from growing the only profitable crop that they know, just because we allow our own bandits to profit from selling heroine to fools.  (On this latter subject, if the drug addicts were thrown into a cell and allowed to 'dry out' naturally, the hell of drying out would be punishment enough to deter them from a second try.  Or if they are just that plain stupid, let them suffer).  But treat drug-dealers like the Islamic countries do; it would deter most of them.

But back to Bush and Blaire.  Instead of letting the 'backward' countries slowly learn from the West, we have to try and force a hundred years of progress into five years.  By all means, try and teach the third world the folly of large families, but let the society slowly evolve as we did; there would be much less hassle for all concerned.