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Democracies and War

by Paul Gessing

As we in the United States celebrate Memorial Day, I noticed an article by James Bovard on the relevance of democracies and whether they make war on each other or not. My college political science professors liked to say that democracies don't go to war against each other. Democracy-building has been a core tenet of American foreign policy since at least the days of Woodrow Wilson. As Bovard makes clear in his excellent article, democracies often do fight each other and have done so for hundreds of years, for a variety of reason.

The point is not to denigrate democracy as a means of political organization, but to encourage the American people to question their political leaders the next time they preach "spreading democracy" as a foreign policy goal.

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Comments

It was a good read until the author started in with "Bush’s effort to save the world" and "Bush's war."

Then he lost his credibility, clearly indicating he has an ax to grind.

After that he started making some pretty gargantuan leaps regarding democracies and war. For example: "Supposedly, any government that is not a democracy is now simply a war waiting to happen. Because democracies never attack other democracies, they are entitled to launch unprovoked attacks on nondemocracies to force them to become democracies — and thereby ensure peace."

This notion of entitlement is simply stupid. I would expect better from a writer using history to promote an argument.

Finally, the writer falls into the giant trap of "generization of speech," something politicians create as frequently as we mere mortals critiquing articles by people with axes to grind.

When Bush says: “The only way to achieve peace is for there to be democracies living side by side. Democracies don’t fight each other.” the intelligent, critical thinkers amongs us don't fly off the handle and write long-winded articles based on statements of absolution such as the foregoing one.

We know instinctively, with even rudimentary historical knowledge, that it is much more likely that “The BEST way to achieve peace is for there to be democracies living side by side. Democracies TYPICALLY don’t fight each other.”

The premise of the article has merit but its articulation is very poor and would be better served by someone more objective, preferrably an historian.

Jay
jihadjay@americanjihad.us

# posted at by Jihad Jay