On Thu, 25 Dec 2003 21:28:02 GMT, Chad Irby wrote:

"Carl Alex Friis Nielsen" wrote:

Why do you assume the US will only fight totalitarian regimes ?

Name a non-totalitarian regime that has a good chance of going up
against the US militarily in the next 20 years.

Or that totalitarian regimes can't exist with the suport of the
population - remember that only about 20 % of the worlds population
share our western values.

Name a true regime of that sort with real popular support. Should be
simple, right?


Well, a lot of it depends on what you mean by totalitarian. Some
people would call Iran that, but the government enjoys a fair amount
of support, and even many of those who dislike it don't do so enough
to cooperate with a U.S. invasion.
China is another example where many of the citizens support the
government, and while the government is authoritarian, I wouldn't call
it totalitarian in the Hussein mode, but it might be coming into
conflict with the U.S. at some point.

And you migth consider that a democracy has the problem that if
somethign blows up to create great public outcry, the elected leaders
might have to go along with it, even though they wish to avoid the
conflict.
Although not a democracy, China had this problem with the EP3
incident. They called out the demonstraters, but once nationalism got
involved the demonstrations quickly started to escalate beyond what
the leadership wanted. Scared them badly, by some accounts.