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Showing posts from June 9, 2006

More on East Timor and Nation Building

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Highly recommended Doug Bandow's For America, a Nation-Building Disaster Avoided in which he notes: One disaster avoided by both the Clinton and Bush administrations is East Timor (or, as it now styles itself, the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste). Once a model of foreign nation-building, this fledgling nation has again become an international ward. But, miraculously, no American troops are involved. Bandow recalls that after the Indonesians decided to get out of East Timor, following a pro-independence vote by its people, there was a lot of pressure on Washington to "do something," that is, to send U.S. troops and engage in some Nation Building: After the usual international huffing and puffing, Jakarta agreed to dump the problem into the hands of the United Nations. The Java Empire could ill afford to ignore an overwhelming secessionist vote that it had called. Attempting to stuff the independence genie back into the bottle would have been even more costly than befor