Not bad

However, not successful countries are democracies.

YOu may want to work on that sentence.

Also, I don't know if you have a word limit

500 word limit. I came in at 526. I would have loved to have expanded it to encompass more. I'm sure I'll get my chance later on in the courses. This was just my admissions application.

"However, not successful countries are democracies." ...You may want to work on that sentence.

Yeah, that was an oops. But it kept my word count down!

One alternative to democracy is fierce and scary. The Stalinist state is seen as the most extreme example of totalitarianism; the term has come to encapsulate all that is evil, cruel, and hegemonic. This bipolarity between totalitarianism and democracy created a natural antipathy between America and the Soviet Union. By fighting totalitarianism, we tried to establish democracies.

Yeah, that was an oops. But it kept my word count down!

Might want to cut down on the totalitarianism there.

The only thing I haveto say about that is this:

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those others that have been tried from time to time.
Winston Churchill

Do you really think the Iranians are "doing just fine"?

Theocracies don't have a particularly good track record, whether Islamic or Christian, tending to be rather intolerant of opposing points of view, internal or external, to put it mildly.

These days, only those who have endured oppressive regimes, secular or religious, and have then tasted the freedom of a democratic republic have any real sense of how superior is the latter. Those of us who've never known anything else tend to take it for granted and profoundly underestimate our good fortune. Should we "force" democracy on other countries? No, and we are not - we have lifted the threat of despotic coercion and given the Iraqi people the opportunity to choose their own form of government.

However, I fully expect the media to call whatever happens in Iraq a "failure" - anything less than a clone of the US system and its values will be grounds for the claim we should never have gone in (& by implication, "wasted our time, money and soldiers' lives"), and if that is exactly what results, we will be accused of "forcing" our values down the throats of the Iraqis who (in the infallible judgement of the media) didn't want it. The media fully intend to have their cake and eat it, too. We'll never see a 72-point headline celebrating success in Iraq, no matter what.

I bring Iraq into the discussion because there is no other contemporary context in which the question posed would even come up.

Cheers,
Daiwa

The question facing their burgeoning nation was whether or not men could be trusted to lead their own people.

The obvious answer being no. But what alternative? In a democracy, you're led by....men leading the people. In a republic.......men again. Communism? Men. Feudalism.......men. Totatlitarianism........Man. Theocracy...........technically God, but amazingly enough he doesn't seem to be communicating to those countries to all individuals on a one on one basis, just through......you guessed it, men.

"And the blind shall lead the blind, and both shall fall into the ditch."

Do you really think the Iranians are "doing just fine"?

Yes, I think the Iranians are scoring quite well on their externals. They have a pretty sound economy, good oil exportation rates (without being a member of OPEC), and they are pretty liberally minded for an oppressive religious regime. They have an almost transparent record of somewhat open elections.

So they crush internal dissent and have a ruling group of clerics who wield the actual power in Iran... we can't have our cake and eat it, too, you know.

So they crush internal dissent and have a ruling group of clerics who wield the actual power in Iran... we can't have our cake and eat it, too, you know.

They have a cancer that is eating at them internally.  and the scary part, is they have a Nuclear program.  They have lasted 25 years, I dont see them around another 25.  Not in this form.