But one reason for the new generation of populist leaders in Latin and South America is that most of the US supported puppets from the 70′s and 80′s are gone.

The U.S. government has supported dictators in almost every country in S. America, including Venezeula, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Argentina and Cuba. We’ve undermined popular leaders and revolutions in Vietnam, Iran and Iraq to name a few.

As for the current administration, they badgered european nations that wouldn’t go along with our plans to invade Iraq, even though throughout those countries (Germany, Russia, France) and most of the world public opinion was 90% against the invasion. The Bush administration instead heaped praise on Turkey for allowing us to use their country as a base, despite their populations overwhelming disapproval.

Democratizing Iraq only became an excuse for the occupation after we didn’t find any WMDs. Bush and Blair focused exclusively on WMDs and terrorism in the lead up to the war. Democracy was not mentioned to the American people as a selling point.

Even after Bush said we were bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq as our primary mission, he still opposed elections. He wanted to install Bremer or Chalabi as the leader and be done with it. Sistani and his supporters forced Bush to hold elections after mass demonstrations. Then of course Bush changed course again and said it was his idea to hold elections all along.

In the lead-up to those elections, the U.S. government spent millions of dollars to try to get their favored candidates (like Chalabi) in office.

Doesn’t seem like a lot of democracy promotion to me. Don’t let the propaganda fool you.

Kennedy was trying to promote peace by helping undo the horrid humanitarian results caused by the actions of the United States and the Soviet Union to little powerless third world nations, as they waged their “cold war” all over the world. Another reason so many rightfully hate us I’m sure.

We cannot continue to ask the stupid question: “Why do they hate us” while completely overlooking our not-so-distant past.

I imagine that the election of Hamas gave the admistration pause. Besides, many world leaders (indluding Putin) have indicated they don’t apprecieate the US preaching at them.

Now that we’ve made the mess in Iraq, they don’t feel we are the country to point the way to a batter solution.

In this kind of atmosphere, it’s wise for the US to stop preaching for awhile. It needs to rebuild its reputation before it can be credible voice.

In particular, there seem to be different kinds of terrorists – those attempting to set up a new state like ETA and the Tamil Tigers, people like Timothy McVeigh who are probably not inspired by any political situation, people from democracies who adopt the causes of people in un-Democratic places, religious terrorists, etc.

I.e. Just because a country is a liberal democracy doesn’t seem to preclude it from having terrorists originate there.

Woodrow Wilson did no such thing and nor did John F Kennedy either. Conservative republicans are soley responsible for initiating “forced” American foreign policy upon sovereign nations. A major blight in the history of the United States and a complete disregard for the intent of our founding fathers.

Good Grief the propaganda just roars on.

In any case it only works in certain places. The Kurds are a good candidate for democracy and capitalism; they really don’t fit with the rest of Iraq. It worked in Eastern Europe because they had some moderate reforms first and had chafed under Soviet rule since the end of WWII

I must agree with White Agent in this regard.

The Islamic world in particular seems to have very strong cultural antibodies against the virus of American-style democracy.

Ironically, as was the case in Algeria in the 1990s when there were initial moves towards democracy, the parties most predicted to win are often anti-democratic Islamic parties whose first laws upon assuming power would be to stamp out democracy.

White Agent does not, however, note that this idealistic streak in US foreign policy was founded by a Democrat: Woodrow Wilson. It has also long been a tenet of Democratic liberalism (c.f. Kennedy’s Inaugural address).

After 9/11 and before it they were awar, as probably Clinton was, that the break-up of the Soviet Union had allowed terrorist groups to try to buy nuclear components on the black market, and that our decades-long policies of supporting repression in the ME had caught up with us. So we could try to attack terrorism directly with force- and root it out with intelligence networks and interrogation in secret prisons- which is what they decided or they could encourage adoption of democratic reforms to ease the anger that’s behind it. I think the policy was initially supposed to be a combination of both, but our credibility in the second area has been severely damaged by our actions in the first.

Interesting read, thanks!

However, as we have clearly seen, the neocon political policy of “pushing” or “bullying” other nations to adopt American political ideologies for their own, has failed. These republicans are so embarrassing.