[simon]

Originally Posted by haku

You purposely missed my point instead of addressing it. Of course i have double standards in this area! I expect nothing from a dictator, i expect a lot from a democratically elected government. Is this so hard to understand that i expect better from a democracy than a dictatorship?

I understood it perfectly. I said you were guilty of double standards to criticise democracies more than you criticise dictatorships and you admit it.

Where's the limit? Who is going to decide which countries have to be "liberated" and which countries are allowed to "liberate" others? The Soviet Union claimed that they were liberating the Baltic States, China claimed that they were liberating Tibet, Indonesia claimed that they were liberating Timor. You're acting like this "right" to intervene in other countries can only be used in a good way, a democracy overthrowing a dictator. That sounds nice on paper but this right can be used by any country, a powerful dictatorship might use that same right to get rid of an annoying little democracy. Maybe China will "liberate" Taiwan tomorrow? Who's going to stop them?
In fact this argument can be used by any country that wants to invade a neighbor.

The difference is surely rather obvious. China wouldn't be 'liberating' Taiwan if it invaded and overthrew Taiwan's democratic government. America was liberating Iraq when it invaded and overthrew Saddam's dictatorship. A democracy can liberate a dictatorship, a dictatorship can't liberate a democracy. Is that so hard to understand? The world understood the difference when Nato liberated Kosovo.

As for your mockery of the French motto, what can i say, we did try to export the values of the French Revolution 200 years ago... "All men are born free and equal"... We tried to spread that across Europe but Britain brilliantly defeated us, remember? "All men are born free and equal"... Ironically only the US colonies agreed with us on that at the time. We learned the hard way that you can't impose those values by force on other peoples, and it's Britain which taught us that.

It wasn't attempting to spread the values of liberty, equality and fraternity that backfired - it was later going back and imposing Napoleon's family as the kings and queens of Europe. I know that it is very difficult to spread democratic ideas to people who aren't ready for them, but most Iraqis say they want democracy. Twenty years ago, almost nobody outside Western Europe and North America had democracy and many people said the rest of the world wasn't ready for it. Now there is democracy across Europe, Latin America, most of Africa and much of Asia. Maybe something makes Iraqi Arabs unable to handle it, even though they say they want it (the Kurds have had it for several years). But it's surely a bit patronising to just assume that people who don't yet have democracy are too backward for it.