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1. Style. People don’t like to be bullied and threatened, even to change for their own good.
2. Credibility. The US simply does not have much credibility in the middle east in terms of consistency or fairness. If Washington uses war and pressure diplomacy to implement United Nations resolutions in Lebanon and Iraq, but does nothing parallel to implement UN resolutions calling for the freedom of Palestinians from Israeli occupation
3. Consistency. The United States could promote freedom and democracy without waging war in Iraq, spending $300 billion... It can better promote democracy and rally Arab democrats by telling presidents Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, for example, that over twenty years of being president without any meaningful legal opposition is enough. It can support term limits for Arab presidents, and promote democracy among its Arab allies and friends, such as Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunis and, now, Libya, whose leader has been in power for thirty-six years.
4. Motive. A perpetually changing motive for the American war in Iraq is not good for American credibility.
5. Context. ...the issue of promoting freedom and democracy is dwarfed by the more pressing imperatives of stable statehood, liberation from foreign occupation, meeting basic human needs, and stopping the tradition of foreign armies coming at us every couple of generations and redrawing our maps and reconfiguring our systems.
6. Legitimacy. There is no global consensus that the United States is mandated to promote freedom and democracy, or that this is America’s divinely ordained destiny. There is such a mandate, though, in the United Nations’ charter
7. Militarism. The American use of pre-emptive war for regime change, already applied in Afghanistan and Iraq, creates more problems than it resolves. It shatters the concept of peace and security through international law
8. Relevance. The value of individual freedom as defined in American culture runs against the grain of the concept of freedom as it is understood in most of the middle east and the developing world, where people sacrifice certain individual liberties for the protection, the identity, the sense of hope, the well-being and the communal expression that comes from belonging to a bigger group.
excerpts taken from http://www.opendemocracy.net/debate...e-2-46-2397.jsp
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