How do you know what the population of said country considers? Secret ballot? That's all I'm in favour of implementing, for pragmatic reasons.
I agree, its not easy to find out (if i understood what you're implying correctly). Which is actually why, amongst other reasons, i think its a terrible idea to meddle in such a way.
I am in favour of introducing democracy, so that whatever the population wants, it can have.
At what price though? And what if they don't want democracy?
See, just before you get my intentions the wrong way. I do understand the complexity of the situation, and i do understand its extremely difficult to accomplish freedom for another country, but thats exactly what i'm trying to show you. All what i'm saying and will say is in attempt to point out how the decision of attempting to regulate slavery was made.
There already were people stepping up for what they wanted. They were called political dissidents, and they were on the losing side of a war with Saddam. I am in favour of providing the muscle power so that they can have their views implemented.
What about the rest, the (usually) majority of population who are silent? How can we make such decisions for them?
Wouldn't it be better then, to just attempt to help those people you mentioned
without stepping on the rest, if possible?
People who regulated slavery didn't want what was best for the slaves, otherwise they would have mandated that the slaves be set free.
What if in fact that wasn't possible at the time?
Not that they say that, but to actually make it happen i mean.
If you consider a rational, humanist, non-subjugating government to be "slavery" instead of "freedom", then I have no real comment. The communists also insisted that capitalism was slavery and communism was freedom, and there was no way to budge them from that position.
This all seems to hinge on your apparently different definition of freedom. So of course you will think I am wrong.
What i find is a subjugating government is this:
Eliminate the competitors to secular capitalist liberal democracy
You have listed all your preferred political/economical and/or world views. You're basically doing exactly this: forcing your world view on others.
Note however, that i in fact do not oppose any of those things you listed. In fact, i'm in favor of almost all of them.
We DO know better. We know that rational, humanist, non-subjugating government is the best form of government known to man.
I agree, but what you're suggesting isn't exactly that, in my view. At least, the way you want to go about it, will result in a period where such thing will be no where near happening. If you think thats justified since:
1) They were already enslaved/subjugated.
2) In the future things will get better gradually.
Then again i think thats exactly what
some of people who regulated slavery were thinking of.
People were already being sacrificed by Saddam. As well as being enslaved. You're failing to take that into account. People die in car accidents too. Do you support cars? Does that make you a mass murderer?
I really do take it into account. I'm just trying to point out the difficulty of deciding on such matters. What to do and how to deal with it, when its a fact of life.
I disagree with your approach, but thats not what i'm arguing here. Here i'm just attempting to get you to possibly understand the position of those people thousands of years ago.
With Iraq, Saddam was actually ordering the rape of women. It wasn't hard to expect that the Iraqis wouldn't democratically choose a government that allowed institutionalized rape.
I agree, at least for certainly many people. But we don't know that they wanted such help and in such a fashion.
