I've also been on the ground in Arap Moi's Kenya. If I made even the most mildly critical remark concerning this strongman, my hearers became nervous. I know what that meant.

Define a 'simple democracy'.

Self-government is the government a nation chooses/develops/evolves without external impositions. Time and again strong nations have tried to decide what is best for weaker nations and time and again it results in problems. Just because we see democracy as the best possible system of governance, does not mean it is the best system of governance. Even if it is the best system of governance, it is denuded if it is externally imposed on a nation which either does not want it, or where their history and national tendencies subvert it into something else. Democracy works when it is a system arrived at by the people it serves in the natural course of their development or in the wake of great changes. It does not work as an externally imposed system.

Self government is better than good government.

Only if those people want what we are trying to "help" them with :rolleyes:
We fucked-over the only people who were willing to fight Saddam the first time. We promised to take him out and we LIED, Bush Sr. knew he was lying and knew he was going to abandon them to death and torture. It is why so many of the Army and Marine senior staff quit after Desert Storm... they were humiliated at being told to lose that war and leave their rebel partners to be hunted down like animals. A black spot on our history we can never live down. Typical Bush family. That whole line about taking him out harming "relations" with the neighbors is Bull-Shit, pure Bull-Shit.
This time, there was no uprising, we are not being helped by massive popular support. If so the locals would have narced out all of the insurgents and we would have them all by now... but we do not because we are not welcome because we are imperial invaders and need to get out.
Iraq, this time, was not the "bleeding man on the street" scenario and they were not a threat to us... it was all lies and still is.

Sure, if there is a popular uprising against a tyrant, help em' out, but we should not be creating them... no.

Again, there is not a nation out there that the people cannot remove the government if they choose/want to. What we know is often not scary enough to get us to act to wards the unknown fear. Still no excuse.

Democracy is a terrible government... I am very glad the US is not one.

I disagree: we should be creating them. All of humanity's troubles come from overweening power. Autocracy makes this.

Societies that are largely democratic, generally libertarian are the only cure to this disease that I know.

The second those same democracies become the unwelcome and overweening power in the world at large, then they become part of the disease and are no longer the cure.

Besides which, we in the 'enlightened' West are less interested in creating/installing actual democracies than we are in creating/installing sympathetic governments.

I agree Dana.
Chile under Allende/ Venezuala under Chavez

Two assholes who were elected and were both targeted for removal by the US. Pro-democracy? Get real.

Not to pooh-pooh, Dana, but are there any examples of this? Ever? I ask because democracies simply don't make trouble for other democracies. The occasional trade tiff is about as nasty as it ever gets.

Is not the former naturally going to be the latter, and the latter unlikely to be actually sympathetic enough without being the former? Too, is not the art of politics the art of the possible?

Times of great excitement tend to be those times somebody tries to recast just what is possible. Lincoln, Kennedy, and Reagan come to mind. Edmund Burke on the other side of the pond.

Griff, I hope you don't believe either Allende or Chavez are any kind of democrat.