this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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Imposing Democracy on others does not seem to work, or requires a skill set rarely developed.
It worked in Japan and Germany. Depends a lot on the context. Still too risky to consider it a good default strategy.
Iraq is definitely better off than they were under Saddam, if you want a more recent example.
All it cost was untold suffering and a million dead Iraqis to overthrow the dictator America installed in the first place.
Source?
I googled it, results vary from 250k to 500k, so not quite a million but still, that's a lot of deaths. Either way, the US government's real reason for that war was not to save the country from dictatorship ...
Point of Clarification. Are you calling Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer a dictator, or referring to an earlier point in time?
I come from a country, Portugal, were the people conquered Democracy from the Fascists by force (though it was mainly a peaceful affair).
In next door Spain some years later the Fascists passed some laws to give themselves immunity and keep the wealth they stole from the rest and then left power, which is how they became a Democracy.
Portugal has none of the problems of regionalist breakaway movements that Spain has, the Far Right is more recent smaller and way milder than in Spain (were even the mainstream Rightwing-party has always been far more to the Right than the equivalent one in Portugal).
(Portugal is a far ... far, far ... from perfect country, but at least in this things seem to have been done right)
Whilst indeed it's anecdotal, this and what I've seen over the years when it comes to foreign interventions to "bring democracy", leads me to believe that Democracy, to be stable, has to be won, not "gifted" by a dictatorship (and even a foreign invader which is a democratic country is de facto a dictatorship for the locals of the occcupied country as they don't get to vote in that country's elections and are quite literally being governed by dictat).
I feel like they imposed "democracy" in a way that allowed them to use that country as a puppet for material and strategic gain. Real lasting change has to be from the bottom up.