[Urbane Guerrilla]

Well, I can see this will take a while -- and most of what Redux claims are failures (for he believes it with a religious intensity) are not, I think, failures in the end. Further remarks to follow.

Briefly, DanaC -- I for one could hardly oppose the demolition of a fascist regime, now could I? Could you -- in anything like good conscience? How can a democracy taking down a dictatorship be a wrongness, when dictatorships are invariably about the oppression? They differ only in degree, after all -- the less virulent that way are suffered to exist by the rest of the global community, but such suffrance doesn't add up to improvement, or even good. Dictatorships and autocracies are the ones that go easily to war; democracies, driven and steered by popular consensus, far less so. This is evinced even in this last decade and the one before it in the United States: who is seriously arming their nation against the US military? No one, except perhaps the North Koreans, who are sharply constrained by their lack of resources and so-so intel. Even Cuba, which professes to be greatly worried, isn't meeting its words with action.

Why is this? Try this idea on for size: it's because of the way we use it. No one is concerned that they will be randomly, arbitrarily plucked like low-hanging fruit by American marauders.