Just finished a book by a Scotsman who recently traveled the width of Afghanistan. He traveled as an Afghani would rather than as a tourist.

Your comment about democracy needing to be cultivated in the "given turf" of a country reminded me of a q. and a. between the Scot and a local Afghani.

"Why did you become a Mujahid?" the Scot asked.
"Because the Russian government stopped my women from wearing head scarves and confiscated my donkeys."
"Why did you fight the Taliban?"
"Because they forced my women to wear burqas, not head scarves, and stole my donkeys."

Not to be flip, but do you suppose the Afghans would be ammenable to establishing and supporting a democracy if it meant that their women could wear whatever they wanted and that a democratic government would never confiscate their donkeys, let alone steal them?

One man's 'given turf' is seldom if ever anothers.

I'm so tired of the "throwing money at it" canard. Exactly which social programs are we throwing money at? Health care for the poor and children is non-existent or underfunded, unemployment insurance is inadequate, welfare ("as we know it") has been eliminated, and urban schools, which have the biggest problems to deal with, get half the funds of rich suburban districts.

There is only one government sector which gets money thrown at it with no oversight - the military.

Military spending is now up to 54% of the federal discretionary budget. Military spending by the US equals that of the rest of the world combined.

See for yourself:
Federal Pie Chart

It seems the only way those opposed to social programs can prove their point is by ignoring the facts.

Worst of all, scarce resources--and there are always fewer available than we need

Are they truly fewer or do we just lack the will to obtain them. 50 years ago the incremental tax rate was 90% on a not unimaginably high level of income but our economy functioned , inventory invented , we had 2.5% unemployment, and my mother could enjoy walking across Central Park in the dark.

It's worth observing that the decade long period of growth in the UK was echoed in what is now a five year drop in crime. To that sort of levels we haven't experienced since 1952

It's not that our GDP is inadequate to support,say, a national health system like ,say,
Belgium's. It's that it is inadequate both to support that and also support the life style of the sizeable cohort who can't even comprehend flying first class because they have become so used to a private jet.

With respect to democratizing other countries , the constraint is not our resources but the inherent contradiction of the task. We can't convince people to respect the view of one another by imposing our views on them.

I agree with the "throwing money at the problem" argument if it is applied to the Pentagon and all of the assinine, needless, and unproductive spending programs we maintain in the name of "defense".

We spend more on the military than all the other countries on earth combined and have proven beyond any question the futility of 19th Century-style imperialism even when conducted with 21st century weapons technology. It doesn't work. It hasn't worked. It won't work.

We are throwing good money after bad by the billions daily attempting to make a proven failure work when we know that no amount of money and killing will make it work. We are applying an inappropriate AND ineffective remedy to a set of problems that calls for something quite different. It makes no sense at all for us to do what Bush and Cheney and the other war criminals who agree with their policy have been doing. If we gave every person in Iraq a per capita share of all the money we have wasted trying to kill them, destroy their society and their infrastructure how many friends do you think we would have there by now? Instead, we have done everything anyone can think of to try and get them to hate us. Anyone responsible for killing my family would have my undying hatred as would their as would the country they came from that launched the illegal invasion of my homeland for no good reason whatsoever.

In contrast to the proven failure of killing and military might to keep us safe, we have all sorts of very positive data (nearly endless actually) indicating that spending on health care for all citizens actually improves the health of populations, that spending on programs that raise incomes actually reduces poverty and helps the poor and near poor to improve their lives and become more self-sufficient if not completely self-sufficient, and we also know that the more money we invest in education the more intelligent our population becomes and the more resistant they are to the malarky of hucksters and con-men whether in clerical or political garb whether the subject matter is "evil-loution", the frightening "homosexual agenda", saving our nation from those who would not force prayer on kids in the public schools, establishing sensible gun laws, or wearing a flag lapel pin. That is where our money should have been going all these years instead of down the military rat hole. If we cut our military spending in half we'd still be spending more than any of our closest rivals but we'd then free up enough money to have a national health care system that is free for all, we could eliminate poverty in a generation and we could improve education for every child in the United States. The amount of money wasted on the military is utterly obscene and it ought to be the real issue being debated in the Presidential race and on every blog and in every newspaper.

Bush's binge of spending and killing has imperiled our entire way of life in the United States, made us the most hated nation on earth and is the number one threat to our national security. We need a radical transformation of our political and economic system before Bush and his real constituency (the idle rich) destroy what is left of America.

The only thing we, as foreigners, can do to promote democracy is to be diplomatically extra-friendly to democratic countries, and to countries with independent, trustworthy judiciaries, and stuff like that -- and less helpful to undemocratic countries where the rule of law is not present. This might actually work!

Of course, the US has done exactly the opposite, overthrowing democracies in Central and South America with great regularity, trying to isolate and refusing to recognize Hamas -- which won free and fair elections -- sabre-rattling against Iran (which does have elections, though not fully free and fair, and has a well-respected judiciary) -- while supporting the most undemocratic country in the world, Saudi Arabia, essentially unconditionally.

I don't know whether "democratization" would work. After all, we have never tried it.

I think that Etzioni quickly puts policies that, liberal rhetoric aside, are essentially the stuff of imperialism -- "the great game" -- a disease of both the pidgin conservatism and the weak-on-the-progressive side pidgin liberalism that dominates US politics.

Note that the rhetoric about 'throwing money at problems' has almost ALWAYS been cited in US politics on the guns side of the guns v butter debate. Truth is, for the $100 billion + that the TOTAL costs of the Kosovo War (let alone the trillions on the Iraq debacle do and will cost) will ultimately cost NATO et al, MUCH humanitarian good can be done.

I think a better way of formulating the lessons that the specifics Etzioni cites (which is not where I disagree with him) is that you can't bomb your way to utopia, PLUS it's INCREDIBLY expensive. A massive eco-industrial transformation of our own system, another phase of the "industrial revolution" on the other hand, is money invested that DOES grow, and at the international level (where NECESSITY is indeed a factor), an ecology-centric program for fundamental development in the less developed world is also necessary for environmental as well as 'bleeding heart' reasons.

Underneath Etzioni's commentary here is a kind of scapegoating -- that somehow "bleeding heart" liberalism was what got us into Iraq. As they say in French: BULLSHIT! It was ever-so-thinly veiled imperialist exploitation of the natural mass US public response to 9/11, amply attested to by Richard Clarke and others, and the temptation of a 'war of opportunity' that got us into Iraq, and no amount of even the most prestigious scholars turning our heads to more agenda-appropriate scapegoats will change that fact.

I would add that if anyone REALLY took democracy in the MidEast seriously, as a real policy rather than as a rhetorical air-freshener, surely better possibilities were posed by the case of Kuwait, which after the 1991 war OWED ITS CONTINUED EXISTENCE to the willingness of the US to step up to the plate (though I am one of those woolly-headed lefties who felt that it was possible and desirable to achieve a negotiated withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait, as well as desisting from the WMD program -- something that in hindsight really wasn't such an impractical approach after all, now was it?). Kuwait is a small, wealthy country whose emir owed his ass to us, and we should have and could have insisted on basic parliamentary reform (allowing the franchise at least to those persons already born in Kuwait, as of 1990 and not 1920) and cultivated that country's relatively fertile circumstances for cultivating the indeed fragile plant of a democratic polity.

I think that not the highly addictive elixir of anti-idealism, one on which US politics has long been hooked, but the more difficult and more enlightened, if too genuinely populist for today's state elite monopsonist market politics, medicine of ANTI-imperialism, to overcome yet that other most dangerous policy addiction, is what is desperately needed, and worth pursuing.

ANTI-IMPERIALISM -- and its flip-side, pursuit of a genuinely participatory democratic SOCIETY -- is not necessarily the sweetest or best-credentialled medicine out there, but it is UTTERLY essential for what ails America and the world.