Democracy in Iraq

Current Events
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Hello all, I’m a new member and am excited to find this online Objectivist refuge…

That being said, I’d like to ask you all something that I’ve been mulling over. It picks up on something RationalEgoistSG feels in the message about Occupying Iraq. Watching this drama unfold, it’s clear who the players are: us, the capitalist, democratic nation trying to give the gift of a government that recognizes individual rights and the theocratic people we have liberated. My question, similar to RationalEgoistSG’s is this: are the Iraqi people ready for democracy? Additionally, to what extent to we labor over this cause?

I’d also like to backtrack in time to consider the war to begin with. I am personally glad that we finished what we should have finished in '91 (before the liberal media tried to create sympathy for the soldiers we routed on the way to Baghdad). But to what extent do we have the right to take action in cases like these? I find myself admittedly confused between our responsibility to defend our own interests and the rights I recognize in all men. I firmly believe that capitalism is the ultimate recognition of the individual, but at what cost do we expend our energy and resources on a people who have clearly placed their faith in the pseudobeliefs of religion?

I’m glad to have found you all, and I hope your discourse will help my thoughts as well as spark some of your own.

Thanks

Aaron Schmidt

[email protected]

University of Virginia Football

I’m a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.

-Thomas Jefferson

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Welcome to the forum. Soon enough, an admin will come by and say that to you again.

An oppressive dictatorship is not the will of the people - it is an entity initiating force against them. As such, it has no rights, meaning, all moral principles of Objectivism condemn and damn it. There is no moral principle against overthrowing it, whether the overthrowers are the army, the citizens, or another country.

Nobody has a moral impertative to overthrow it. However, anyone has the moral option of doing so if it is in his own interests. America decided safety from wmd and safety from terrorists was a pretty big interests and so, quite morally, pursued both its safety and the destruction of the Iraqi dictatorship. In answer to all those liberals who claim we only went in for oil, moreover, the Objectivist argument is, so what? Saddam and his possy had no right to exist, and if we want to destroy them and take their oil, that’s perfectly within our rights.

We have no duty to install a representative constitutional republic form of government, or any form whatsoever. That is a duty upon the Iraqis themselves. It is certainly our prerogative to aid them in it (with volunteer money; not with taxes).

To recap: we have no duties; dictatorships have no rights.