Why We Are Fighting In Iraq

The foreign policy of the United States, the War on Terror, and the War in Iraq is predicated on the democratic peace. President bush has expressed this explicitly in describing his Forward Strategy of Freedom. Secretary Rumsfeld has mentioned it, and Secretary Rice has accepted it as background to her speeches on democracy. Because of the democratic peace, even President Clinton made promoting democracy one of the pillars of his foreign policy.The democratic peace is now the best empirically established theory and most widely held among students of international relations. The theory, which goes back to the Philosopher Immanuel Kant in his Perpetual Peace (1795), is that:(continued here)

Bush's Forward Strategy of Freedom

The democratic peace--that democracies do not or virtually never make war on each other and that inherently democracy is a method of nonviolence--has been mentioned favorably by top leaders, such as Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, President Clinton's former National Security Advisor W. Anthony Lake, and former prime minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu. And the leaders of ASEAN signed a democratic peace oriented pact in October, of which ASEAN spokesman M.C. Abad pointed out, "The introduction of the notion of democratic peace sets the standard of political norm[s] in the region. It means that member states subscribe to the notion that democratic processes promote regional security."(continued here)

Democracies Increase, Violence decreases, Media Still Blind

In his May 28, 2005, op-ed piece, "Give Peace a Chance," in The New York Times, John Tierney points out:The new edition of "Peace and Conflict," a biennial global survey being published next week by the University of Maryland, shows that the number and intensity of wars and armed conflicts have fallen once again, continuing a steady 15-year decline that has halved the amount of organized violence around the world.Tierney is at a loss to explain this and first looks to an economist for an explanation, which is the there is less and less to gain economically from war. And then says:(continued here)