Talk:History of the United States (since 1988)

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[edit] CJK section

CJK,

Your new section requires far too much work to be inserted into the article at the moment. I have created a sandbox where you, along with other editors, can clean up the grammar and spelling; add the lacking historical context and perspective; and NPOV the new section before posting it in the article. Eventually, the text on this page will be ready to post in the article.

172 | Talk 23:13, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

I agree the section needs work. It might also be desirable to add the valuable material where more appropriate chronologically through the article rather than one single section on foreign policy-related events. --TJive 00:19, July 22, 2005 (UTC)
I agree with the above; much of the content covered in the new section is dispersed throughout the other sections of the article. 172 | Talk 02:07, 22 July 2005 (UTC)
I'm assuming if you are going to delete the talk references then you have no major objections to material I have contributed as it currently stands. --TJive 02:14, July 22, 2005 (UTC)
I have none. I'm ready to go through CJK's sandbox. 172 | Talk 04:12, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Huntington

CKJ, if you want to call Huntington's essay "highly critical of U.S. policy," cite your sources and follow the no original research rule. I disagree with your characterization because Huntington is coming from a perspective that holds that the U.S. must forcefully promote its model of free market liberal democracy for the preservation of a peaceful international system. He is often described as a neoconservative, and not a left critic of American foreign policy by any strech of the imagination. If I am wrong, cite your sources saying that I am wrong; in other words, do some JSTOR, LexisNexis, ProjectMuse, Google Scholar, etc. searches, find an article calling this specific Huntington article critical of U.S. policy, then I will concede my point. Otherwise, the claim that the essay is critical of U.S. policy is unsubstantiated information that has to be removed from the article. 172 | Talk 01:27, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Anybody who says that the U.S. "bludgeons" countries that don't "kow-tow" with their "corporate interests" is coming from a negative and not positive perspective. CJK 02:46, 8 November 2005 (UTC)
No, one could be coming from a realist perspective recognizing that the international system is fundamentally anarchic, with a dominant power necessary to maintain the balance of power, peace, and order forcefully. You might see some superficial similarities between Huntington's language and the leftwing polemics against U.S. policy that you have run across online, but their perspectives are totally different. Huntington has little regard for the likes of leftwing antiglobalization activists, and they have little to no regard for him. 172 | Talk 02:58, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

And Huntington, again, is not making that arguement. No one can say that "bludgeon" is going to be the word choice of describing how the U.S. treats other nations if they think of it in a positive way. And if he does think that "bludgeon" is a positive word than he lacks the credibility to be in this article. CJK 20:42, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

I disagree. I think that the aforementioned argument does underpin his analysis. Notice that the statement is that the U.S. has attempted or has been perceived as attempting to bludgeon other countries into adopting U.S.-backed economic and political polices. Huntington is not making this assertion in order to vilify U.S. policy but rather because he considers it a statement of reality. In fact, in the American foreign policymaking community, his work has been among the most influential material put out by a social scientist in the drafting of some of those very policies in question. For example, Huntingon argues in his classic Third Wave that Reagan's robust Cold War policies of promoting American-style free markets and opposing socialist rouge states in Latin America were essential in the region's wave of democratization in the 1980s. As for your argument, cherry-picking one example of word choice while disregarding the rest of the content of the article is an insufficient basis for characterizing the perspective of an essay. By the way, I am probably alone around here in not only having read that essay, along with all of his most influential books, but also in having assigned them to students. That being said, I am not still going to impose my summation of Huntington's essay in a Wikipedia article, given WP:NOR. The same applies to you. Without a citation, both of us have no business making our own original characterizations of the essay. Instead, we can quote him, direct readers to the full article, and let them make up their own minds. If I am so obviously wrong while you are so obviously right, then they will agree with you and make the judgment call on their own at the same time. 172 | Talk 08:25, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

The Huntington quote is ALL negative. Point to two sentences (or mass ;;;;;) in the quote which reflecs positively on U.S. foreign policy. The only thing that may be positive was the "ending ethnic conflicts" but apart from that he is OBVIOUSLY being critical just like the book Killing Hope is critical. CJK

Killing Hope is a propaganda piece that would have no place in a college-level political science course or business being cited in an encyclopedia. Huntington's article, however, is an academic work that is less concerned about describing how the world ought to be and more concerned about describing how the world really is. It is nearly a slander of Huntington to compare his work to Killing Hope. If you do not stop inserting your opinion about his work in the article, which is not so "obvious" by virtue of the fact that I disagree with it and I was assigning Huntington's works in courses probably long before you were born, I will have no choice but to start an RfC on you for revert warring without regard to Wikipedia:No original research, Wikipedia:Cite your sources, and Wikipedia:Neutral Point of View. While you were able to wear me down through revert warring in previous run-ins, this time I will not give in because your description is a complete distortion, completely inaccurate, and completely misleading, as opposed to being generally fine but a bit biased. 172 | Talk 08:48, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
CJK, your basis for saying "highly critical" is the use of terms like "bludgeon". In either version of our article, though, the reader can see the quotation from Huntington in which he uses "bludgeon" and the similar terms you cite. Given that, what additional information do we give the reader by including the characterization? A reader who considers "bludgeon" negative can see it right there on the page. I agree with 172 that a citation to a notable spokesperson, stating that Huntington is critical, would be a proper way to present that opinion, but even if we had that, I don't think the opinion would merit inclusion in the article. The lengthy quotation can speak for itself. JamesMLane 10:22, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
I'm with several other editors here. Anyone who knows Huntington at all knows that he has been a proponent, and even in some ways an architect, of late 20th century US foreign policy. He is certainly not "highly critical" as a general characterization. I don't think I'd quite characterize him as a neo-con (with all that Staussian baggage), but he's definitely a traditional US cold-war conservative. No doubt, some isolated comments he makes are criticisms of aspects of US foreign policy. But to take a sentence or two out of context to make it seem like Huntington is a broad opponent of US policy is deceptive. Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 18:49, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
In a context like this, it is better to quote and to let the reader draw his/her own conclusion than to characterize. -- Jmabel | Talk 20:39, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Chill pill

I can't imagine any real conservative making these kinds of assertions (unless they are isolationists), but I understand the arguement of not characterizing him. Perhaps a better way to phrase it would be "Huntington argues that U.S. foreign policy is mainly to further corporate interests". Then again, I am beginning to wonder if we even need such a long opinionated quote in an encyclopedia article, particularly if it is not balanced out by another opinion.

I'm sorry I slandered Huntington, but his arguement is the same arguement of all far left groups: the corporate capitalists cruely exploit the Third World nations under the guise of blah, blah, blah.

About the RFC threat: Please. I can think of three users off the top of my head (and 172 can too) who have caused many more problems than I have. You (172) may have called your buddies in to help you, but I doubt you could sustain an effective RFC. CJK 15:39, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

I can think of three users off the top of my head (and 172 can too) who have caused many more problems than I have. I think you mean Comandante and NWOG. If that's the case, yes, they are problems; but they seem to be largely under control now. But if you want to start an RfC on either of those two, I'll sign it. 172 | Talk 18:12, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
BTW, CJK, I know that you are an overall good contributor. But I get frustrated at time dealing with you because you have a tendency to assume that everyone who is stating something about U.S. foreign policy that might not immediately start to resonate with you is coming from the perspective of William Blum or Noam Chomsky. This is especially frustrating to be because authors coming from that perspective are largely outside the realm of scholarly discussions of U.S. policy and international politics. There might be some superficial similarity between the terms used in leftwing agitprop and in some scholarly works; but the difference between the perspectives advanced can be the difference between night and day, as is the case with Huntinton and William Blum, the author to whom you compared Huntington. 172 | Talk 18:21, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for the complement, but although I have made only a handful of decent contributions I don't see myself making hundreds of edits each month as you and tons of others do. Huntington may be more respectable than Chomsky or Blum, but the core arguement (U.S. foreign policy is solely based off of economic motivation) is the same, making me want to group these people together. CJK 01:17, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

FWIW, I wouldn't say you slandered Huntington, but rather that you falsely praised him. But in either case, it just wasn't an accurate characterization (you're probably right, in any case, that the long quote is more than we need in this article).
his arguement is the same arguement of all far left groups: the corporate capitalists cruely exploit the Third World nations under the guise of blah, blah, blah. No, it is not. That is a straw man. Stop stating your opinions without citing your sources. Not only is it against Wikipedia protocol, you are way off base with Huntington. 172 | Talk 16:50, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
But try to chill out, overall, I agree that there is no need for an RfC against anyone here at this time. However, while it is true that 172 asked for my input on my talk page, I would not formulate or state any opinion on this page until I looked at the article and edits themselves. I'm not sure if 172 is my "buddy"—I suppose so in the sense that I've cooperated with him on some editing issues—but any insinuation that I am his "lackey" or the like is certainly false (and not goot Wikiquette to make). Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 19:06, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
Indeed Lulu and I have at times disagreed on some points. I simply saw that he was online at the time, making recent edits that appeared on my watchlist. He is one of the editors who is very well informed on contemporary international politics, so I asked for his input on this article. That's the way to do collaborative peer editing, CJK. By the way, to Lulu, thank you for your prompt reply. 172 | Talk 18:08, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

If no one is objecting, I'm removing the Huntington quote. CJK 16:10, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

CJK, I am objecting—very strongly. Until the following relevant topics are covered in the article itself, the Huntington quotation covers too much ground ignored elsewhere in the article:

  • Pressure on other countries to adopt American values and practices regarding human rights and democracy
  • Preventing other countries from acquiring military capabilities that could counter American conventional superiority
  • Enforcing American law extraterritorially in other societies
  • Grading countries according to their adherence to American standards on human rights, drugs, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, missile proliferation, and now religious freedom
  • Applying sanctions against countries that do not meet American standards on these issues
  • Etc.

Each and all of the points brought up in the Huntington quotation will be addressed. The choice is to quote Huntington or bring up several concrete factual examples illustrating each of those points. The latter would take up much more space than the former. So for the sake of readability and concision, the Huntington quotation should remain. 172 | Talk 16:46, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

The Huntington quote is extremely opinionated, not 100& fact, with regards to "corporate interests" and serves no point other than to influence the reader into thinking the U.S. is an imperialist nation. All of those points are already in there or can easily be inserted in a concise NPOV manner. CJK 17:21, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
The article only asserts that Huntington wrote the content in question, which is '100 percent fact'. Readers can make up their own mine, as you are above, concerning Huntington's credibility and perspective. Huntington is one of the most authoritative commentators on international affairs around; your removal of the content based on a complete mischaracterization of his views, IMO, is starting to border on vandalism. 172 | Talk 17:31, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

That is true, but it is absurd to suggest that the average Joe reader is going to not be heavily influenced by such quoting. CJK 01:17, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Compromise for CJK

I added a quotation by Max Boot contextualizing some of the observations on U.S. power that Huntington brings up. [1] This should make clear the arguments of those who disagree with people like Blum and Chomsky any assert that there is nothing at all wrong with U.S. power internationally. 172 | Talk 18:03, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

This is a start, but the quote you provided is much shorter than Huntington, which would have the greater impact on the reader. CJK 01:18, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

My point is that these long opinionated quotes are not encyclopedia-like and are unbalanced anyway. CJK 01:16, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

OK, since you're not responding for whatever reason I'm removing the quotes again. CJK 20:30, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
The premises for your removal of the quotations are wrong regardless of whether I get a chance to spend much time on Wikipedia from day to day. You wrote above: the core arguement (U.S. foreign policy is solely based off of economic motivation) is the same, making me want to group these people together. This statement is wrong. Two divergent theoretical traditions in the social sciences make assumptions that boil down to economic interest determing politics. Marxism is often infamous for its economic determinism, harking back to Marx's (very wrong) comment that the state is but 'the executive committee of the ruling class'. 'Left-wingers' and 'Marxists' are not alone in stressing economic interest. Economic interest is the principal analytic unit used by many social scientists coming from the perspectives of pluralism, public choice theory, or rational choice theory-- all perspectives strongly related to neoclassical economic theory and largely embracing free market economic policies. Huntington, however, does not fall into either of these diverging traditions, strongly rejecting the notion that economic interest determines politics, whether it is coming from the left or the right, from academia or political rhetoric outside academia. Huntington tends to stress balance of power issues rather than economic interests... I suggest you accept the compromise. The article quotes two people who are generally considered Ronald Reagan conservatives (neither are "isolations" or critics of the war in the Iraq), with the last word explaining the importance of American power to global peace and stability in an otherwise very dangeous and unstable world. 172 02:48, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

All I'm saying is that I put these people in the same category, I'm not doing so in the article. And I don't care how many divergent theories there are, I just said that if they view U.S. corporate interests as the prime factor in their foreign policy they are being critical and are making a left-wing arguement. The idea of Huntington being a "Reagan conservative" while rambling on about corporate interests is laughable at best. As I said above the quotes are unequal in size and substance, and are not good encyclopedia quality. When is the last time you saw an encyclopedia have these sort of long opinionated quotes? CJK 19:40, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

If you took a college-level political science course and wrote in an exam that Huntington views U.S. corporate interests as the prime factor in U.S. foreign policy, and is making a critical and 'left-wing' argument, you would marked 'wrong', regardless of the politics of the professor. Hardly any description could be more wrong; Huntington's work is anathema to the radical left. The quotations will remain until the points being made by Huntington and Boot can be incorporated into the article through another format. Until then, they can stay. Plenty of articles around here include quotations, which is quite fine, considering their influence and notability as commentators on international affairs. 172 02:48, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

Based on this quote, Huntington has suggested that the U.S. bullies other nations for corporate interests and not for any other purpose. No right wing person makes that arguement today. And since these quotes are OPINIONS and not objective fact, there is no purpose in incorporating them in the article in any format. CJK 22:13, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

That's a straw man. Huntington is listing activities that the United States has attempted or been perceived as attempting. So by the latter he is trying to take into account an international POV. At any rate, readers can make up their own mind regarding his POV, as you have been. Please accept the compromise so that we don't have to have these almost daily run-ins on the U.S. history articles. 172 00:48, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

He has devoted almost all of his coverage to U.S. corporate interests, so some of them he is implying are true. Notice he does not say "promote freedom" or any statement or opinion that casts the U.S. in a good light. Your "compromise" again is unequal in substance and length and is not encyclopedia-like. We should stick to the facts, not a long drawn out "he said she said" mess. CJK 01:26, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

I'm always having a hard time understanding where you are coming from. It almost seems as if you seem to regard it as a 'bad thing' if a country promotes the interests of its businesses abroad. All countries do it. I don't know about you, Chomsky, and Blum, but I see nothing inherently wrong about it. Further, what you call the "he said she said mess" happens to be Wikipedia:Cite your sources. 172 03:04, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

Huntington has said US forign policy is about promoting corporate interests and "bludgeoning" other nations that do not "kow-tow" it which, as anybody can see, is an anti-American assertion. I don't mind a short "he said she said" I do mind long, drawn out quotes cluttering the article. CJK 20:25, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

Again, that's a straw man. Huntington states that the U.S. has been perceived by some other countries as doing the things he lists; he is not making a polemical statement against the U.S. himself.
He has stated "attempted or perceive" and his list is entirely negative, so unless he is being selectively quoted, I see no way this can happen. CJK 22:20, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

Further, if readers do not want to read the quotation, they can just skip over it, just as they can skip over the plenty of quotations on Wikipedia in other articles that happen to be even longer. If they read it, they can come to their own conclusions. Or they can do a Google search and actually read Huntington's article.

But such quotes naturally influence the average Joe reader who will not do a Google search or skip over it. CJK 22:20, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
If Joe average reader is not a careful reader, that's his problem. We are not going to suppress information because some people have problems reading or fail to think critically. 172 01:30, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
The quote will sway people one way or another, which would violate NPOV. CJK 15:57, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

By the way, I suggest that you stop quibbling with me each day on this page and instead make an attempt to go to the horse's mouth. Send Huntington an email at bbaiter@wcfia.harvard.edu (his address at Harvard). Or write a letter to his office at 1727 Cambridge St. E113. Or call him at 617-495-4432. Or fax him at 617-384-9259. You can demonstrate that you know more about international politics than he does, and explain to him why he's a leftwing nut like William Blum. There's a good chance he might reply. 172 22:05, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

This is not a debate about whether or not Huntington is right. This is a debate over whether his opinions should be inserted into the article or not. CJK 22:20, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia's policy is Wikipedia:Cite your sources. Huntington is a leading authority on international politics, meaning that he is one of the experts whose work is relevant to topics in covered in this article. Therefore, it is appropriate and advisable to cite his work here. On a broader note, you seem to think that there is a clear difference between 'facts' and 'theory,' between 'facts' and 'opinion'; and you seem to be suggesting that Huntington's work is irrelevant because it is just 'opinion.' However, there are no 'facts' independent of theory. Data are processed by people's minds into facts and information, which in turn are thus grounded in people's preconceived theories. All schema for reporting 'the facts' presume something about the relevant concepts, which are necessarily based explicitly or implicitly on some theory. For example, you probably agree that notion that the U.S. promotes freedom abroad, a view stated explicitly in the Max Boot quotation that I inserted in the article, is an empirically grounded and factual statement demonstrated by the defeat of fascism and the installation of liberal democracies in Western Europe and Japan following the Second World War. Yet, this 'fact' is grounded in a particular theory of what 'freedom' means. One argument might be the most compelling, but nevertheless there different understandings of just what constitutes freedom, and the values that underlay the definitions. So it is necessary to state who is defining freedom and how he or she understands it. For our purposes here, in order to comply with the policies Wikipedia:Cite your sources and Wikipedia:No original research, it is necessary to cite just which authority on the relevant academic discourse is applying the concept of freedom. In this case it is Max Boot. The Huntington quotation is another example of the sometimes murky boundaries between fact and theory. That the U.S. promotes or is seen as promoting the interests of its corporations abroad is an empirically verifiable factual claim (meaning that you cannot write off the Huntington passage quoted in the article as mere 'opinion'). In order to find ample evidence of that said claim, one just has to pick up a newspaper. For example, there has never shortage of news reports in the past couple of years on U.S. pressure on China to stop allegedly manipulating its exchange rate policies in order to drive American manufacturers out of business and put American manufacturing workers out of work. Similarly, trade rows between France and the United States constantly erupt when the Americans accuse the French of unfair policies trade policies hurting their export trade. What Huntington is saying is just a statement of reality, or how the world really is as opposed to what he feels the world should be. BTW, it is utterly mystifying how you understand the fact that the U.S. promotes the interests of its corporations abroad as reflecting 'negatively' on the country. When you say that it is "anti-American" to state that the U.S. promotes its corporate interests abroad, you are implying that it is somehow a 'bad' thing for a country to country to look out for its businesses and jobs. The market economy is supposedly driven by self-interest? Do you object to market economies and free enterprise? Now, concerning the status of this article, since you have no grounds for removing the properly cited and relevant material from the article, the discussion has reached a dead end, and I expect my response to be final. No one is helped by suppressing properly cited information in this article. 172 01:26, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
Theories are opinions that many people agree with but have not been proven. I see no reason why the facts just can't be listed. Every other encyclopedia does that. Huntington is quite clear on what he means. He is not talking about ordinary trade disputes, he is saying that the US imposes its corporate interests on other countries, otherwise they get "bludgeoned". Also "promote American corporate interests under the slogans of free trade and open markets" and "undertake military action against Iraq and later maintain harsh economic sanctions against the regime; and categorize certain countries as 'rogue states,' excluding them from global institutions because they refuse to kowtow to American wishes." (italics added) shows a clear POV, so unless you can prove that "free trade" and "open markets" are a gigantic front to disguise American corporate imperialism, it needs to go. And even if you were right, I would have to wonder why it would be in this article if it is so routine. Would there be mention of corporate interests on the other History articles? No, I don't believe so. In addition, the other quote you have provided is unequal in size and substance, but that's OK because I want both removed to ensure a NPOV article and not a debate article. CJK 15:57, 19 November 2005 (UTC)


CJK, gravity is a theory. Perhaps you may be failing to distinguish what is associated with a theory and what is associated with an unchecked hypothesis.

Nope, gravity is a scientific law that is objectively proven. Try again. CJK 21:24, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
Read some of the roughly 10,000 entries that come up on Google for "gravity is a theory" [2]. That something is recognized as a scientific law does not mean that it has somehow transcended the realm of theory. Then, take some classes on epistemology and philosophy of science when you get to college. I assume you're in high school and heading for college, right? Your thinking will have matured considerably once you start to recognize that fact and theory are not be so easily sealed off from each other. 172 00:43, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

At any rate, moving on to the crux of your point, you say that you don't understand why the "facts can't just be listed." However, fact and interpretation cannot be sealed off from each other. The very selection and ordering of some "facts" while ignoring others is itself an act of interpretation. Historians constantly adjust their understanding of the past in response to new questions, new methodologies, new information, and new theoretical imperatives. There always exists more than one legitimate way of recounting past events. So, there is no way for you to come along and claim that objective historical truth was reveled to you, but not to one of the most distinguished professors at Harvard University. Now, if you were to publish academic work on the subject, you too could be quoted in this article. For now, however, we can only work with the way people like Huntington frame the facts relevant to this article, given the no original research rule. Readers, however, are more free than the two of us are in writing this article. They can make the judgment that there might have been a better way for Huntington to order and frame the facts. His quotation is cited, will remain cited, and readers can make what they will of it. For you to claim that readers will fail to think critically and will be unduly influenced by scholarly interpretations of how the world works only serves to insult their intelligence.

I am not "ignoring" any facts, but I am ignoring an opinion from yes, a Harvard professor whose opinion is just as POV as yours or mine. CJK 21:24, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
The difference is that he is one of the world's most well known published authorities on the subject. So Wikipedia's policy "cite your sources" means cite people like Huntington. If he is cited, readers can make what they will of his comments. 172 00:43, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
And the reader is easily swayed with 99% who will simply take it as a widely accepted opinion. CJK 03:29, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a supermarket tabloid. An insult to the intelligence of readers is not grounds for the censorship of content here. 172 05:08, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Now, regarding the substance of your counterarguments against Huntington, they are immaterial because of no original research. If you can cite other people's criticisms of Huntington's work in published academic sources, go ahead.

Once again, long drawn out "he said she said" debates are not encyclopedia-like. CJK 21:24, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Cite your sources, alright? 172 00:43, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

But what either of us two have to say is irrelevant to the article. At any rate, I will go ahead and respond to them in that the two of us can be on the same page in discussion as editors. (1) You object to the following point: "promote American corporate interests under the slogans of free trade and open markets." The United States has corporate interests, like all countries, and "free trade" and "open markets" are slogans by definition. The fact that Huntington recognizes that "free trade" and "open markets" are slogans does not mean that he is against the policies associated with them. I have worked on scores of private and public sector jobs, boards, committees, and the like that were promoting something capsized by some sort of slogan. Sometimes I firmly believed in them. Other times when I was working in sales years back, I knew I was selling bullshit. In short, correctly referring to a term as a slogan is by no means a criticisms in itself.

Huntington is saying that "free market"=promote US Corporate interests. But it is not just that, of course. Now, you can say that "free market" is really a term to disguise some corporate conspiracy that only benefits the very rich, but you will have to cite your sources.
(1) ::Re: Huntington is saying that "free market"=promote US Corporate interests. You say that Huntington is saying that "free trade" and "free market" policies are intended to help promote U.S. corporate interests. Of course they are. What's your point? In an economy where most economic activity is organized by corporations, government policies will have to help American corporations if they are intended to 'help the economy.' CJK, most of the U.S. economy is structured and coordinated by corporations. Most Americans work for corporations. When Bill Clinton was promoting NAFTA, he was not making the argument that trade liberalization would hurt the American economy, was he? The health of U.S. corporations is the health of the U.S. economy. Eisenhower's Defense Secretary Charles Wilson summed this point up well when he stated, "What's good for General Motors is good for the country." If any politician were to dispute that claim, saying that he is not interested in health of GM as a corporation, just imagine how he would be received if he were announcing a campaign for public office at a UAW meeting in Michigan, in front of workers whose livelihoods would be ruined if GM were to go out of business. There may be those on the far-left who consider "corporation" a dirty word; but they are so irrelevant to public discourse that what they associate with a reference to 'promoting corporate interests' is not even worth considering here. In fact, the groups on the left who actually do have some influence on trade policy (blue collar labor-oriented New Deal Democrats from the "Rustbelt" states) object to trade liberalization because they claim that these policies fail to help American corporations, and instead allow the Japanese, Chinese, Indians, and Mexicans overtake the U.S. in industry. (2) Re: Now, you can say that "free market" is really a term to disguise some corporate conspiracy that only benefits the very rich. Where is Huntington saying anything about the "rich?" Where is he even mentioning class distinctions? These are rhetorical questions because he is not saying anything about these matters. Huntington is not saying that the free market 'only benefits the very rich.' He is not stating that only the "very rich" benefit from corporate profits. Perhaps you could point out that he does not refute the notion that only the "very rich" benefit from corporate profits; but, frankly, he does not have to say so because the claim that only the very rich benefit from corporate profits is so idiotic that it would be an insult to the intelligence of his readers (i.e. Foreign Affairs readers, who tend to be as well-educated as any publication's readership) for him to suggest that there's a need for him to say so. By definition, in the United States, a corporation is owned by its shareowners, who can be both very rich and very poor. Legally, no corporation can coerce people into working for it, so it is also safe to assume that its interests are aligned with the people who choose to be employed by it... Look, let me level with you. I think know where you are coming from. I have run into leftwing activists on college campuses since the days of outfits like the Students for a Democratic Society and the Weathermen decades ago; now I run into the nutcases caught up in outfits like International ANSWER. When they speak, I hear "corporate... corporate... corporate... corporate... corporate..." coming out of their mounts so many times that I feel like I am going to start to flinch. They think it's a dirty word-- because they are ignorant. Perhaps they have repeated themselves so many times that other people start to associate the very word "corporation" with their bullshit. I think that that's why you're misunderstanding Huntington. At any rate, you are misunderstanding him. When an informed person like Huntington comes along and refers to "corporations," he is referring to the legal and economic model that happens to be way in which most economic activity in modern society is organized. He is merely referring to the backbone of the American economy. 172 00:43, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

While I concede to you he did not mention the rich, his term "slogan" is still troubling. I quote from Webster's New World Pocket Dictionary: "slogan n motto or phrase, as for advertising purposes". Thus, Huntington has said that "free market" is simply an advertisement disguising corporate interests. He does not think the term "free market" literally exists, it was just invented for US propaganda purposes. You can say that they do help US corporate interests, but you can't deny that that is the only thing "free market" is about. CJK 03:29, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

CJK, Huntington is referring to "free trade" as a slogan for policies of trade liberalization, which are promoted on the basis of their economic benefits to the United States, and, yes, the corporate interests that happen to employ the vast majority of the American population. And yes, the term is a slogan, not a literal expression of reality, when referring to policies like NAFTA. The enactment of NAFTA all of a sudden did not mean that all economic activity was then rendered "free," but rather that some trade policies were liberalized. Also, to refer to the adoption of a slogan does not imply where it originated. He does not imply that the banner of "free trade" was "just invented for US propaganda purposes." In fact, he would never imply that, as other stuff that he has published demonstrates full well that he is aware that "free trade" was a popular political banner in Britain two centuries ago, and from there it spread throughout the world. Re: "You can say that they do help US corporate interests, but you can't deny that that is the only thing "free market" is about." Yes, that's a good way of putting it. Note that Huntington is not stating that is the corporate interests are 'not the only thing the free market is about', as you put it. 172 05:08, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

(2) Re: "undertake military action against Iraq and later maintain harsh economic sanctions against the regime." Uh, have you been paying much attention to the news for the past 15 years?

Somehow I doubt you would have the same standards if I put into this article "Saddam harshly oppressed his own people...". CJK 21:24, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
If you inserted "Saddam harshly oppressed his own people" without citation I would object. If you were citing a Middle East expert or someone who was influential in formulating U.S. policy on Iraq, it would be a different matter. The word "oppression" is a value judgment, so a citation would be in order. At any rate, your example is irrelevant because Huntington is not talking about "oppression." He is referring to harsh economic sanctions against the regime. Until the oil-for-food scheme, the sanctions banned all financial transactions with Iraq, international flights to Iraq, and trade with Iraq in all goods except humanitarian aid in the form of food and medicine. In this sense the sanctions against the regime were indeed as "harsh" as they come, as they largely cut of the export of oil. Under Saddam, the oil industry was owned and run by the regime. The regime heavily depended on oil export revenues. Export earnings from oil were the primary source of revenue in the regime's budget. The export of oil was the regime's principal source of foreign exchange. 172 00:43, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
Yes, the sanctions were so harsh against Saddam that he made millions of dollars by colluding and buying off the UN, while his people writhed in massive poverty and deprivation that the Oil for Food program was to alleviate. This of course, was all blamed on the "harsh" American sanctions. (Yes, I know oil for food only started in 1996, but still). I also find it amusing that you called the Guatemalan dictatorship "repressive" but when we are talking about Saddam its a "value-judgement". CJK 03:29, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
(1) A huge black market illegally circumvented the sanctions, but the black market did not fully make up for the loss in the levels of foreign exchange reserves that the regime had been able to get its hands on before sanctions. (2) Huntington is not claiming in the quotation that the sanctions caused poverty. I don't make this claim either because I am not yet aware of enough evidence. You seem to be under the impression that describing the sanctions against the regime (notice that he did not say "against Iraq" or "the Iraqi people" so as not to imply that the Saddam regime was a legitimate authority in Iraq) as "harsh" implies that the sanctions caused poverty. For that to be the case, one would have to assume that oil export revenues would have otherwise managed to trickle down to the broad Iraqi population-- an assumption that is quite a leap of faith, considering that the oil industry was owned by the state and effectively controlled by Saddam Hussein. It is clear, however, that following the sanctions, Saddam could no longer import anywhere close to the amount of weapons with the foreign exchange revenues coming from oil exports that he used to be able to import. Hence, harsh sanctions against a regime are not necessarily a cause of poverty. (2) Re: I also find it amusing that you called the Guatemalan dictatorship "repressive" but when we are talking about Saddam its a "value-judgement". Earlier, you proposed stating that Saddam harshly oppressed his own people. You did not use the word "repressive." Indeed, the term "repressive" is not a value judgment. "Repression" refers to the act of putting down by force. It is not a value judgment to refer to countless acts of repression under Saddam's rule, but rather a statement of reality. I would not object to describing Saddam's rule as repressive. In fact, I have used the term "repressive" many times to refer to Saddam's regime in articles related to Iraq. The term "oppressive," however, refers to a condition that is difficult to bear. It is always a value judgment. Hence why I said earlier a citation would be in order if you wanted to describe something as "oppressive" rather than "repressive." Please don't mischaracterize my edits, views, and comments. 172 05:08, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

(3) Re: "categorize certain countries as 'rogue states'" This point is about as controversial as the claim that Bill Clinton was president for a time in the 1990s. The U.S. State Department officially categorized countries like Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as "rogue states" until 2000. Toward the end of Clinton's second term, the term "rogue state" was supplanted by the term "states of concern." [3] Later the term was reintroduced under Bush, along with the new terms "Axis of Evil" and "Outposts of Tyranny" appearing in official executive branch documents.

There is no dispute with this. CJK 21:24, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
In a statement you made earlier, you cited the above point as an example of "anti-Americanism." Anyhow, it helps to know that this is not an issue with you any longer. 172 00:43, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

(4) Re: "excluding [rogue states] from global institutions because they refuse to kowtow to American wishes." The only contentious aspect about this claim is not the substance but the use of the metaphor "kowtow." Notice, however, that he is listing policies that the U.S. has attempted and been perceived abroad as having attempted. His use of the term "kowtow" is a way to making reference to one of the ways in which U.S. policy has been perceived from the outside, especially by elites in China, Russia, and France. Perceptions are often wrong, of course, but the fact that such perceptions have been articulated abroad is undisputable.

Really? You know for certain this is a "perceived" and not an "attempted" allegation? I certainly can't tell from the quote. CJK 21:24, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
It is not explicit in this quotations, but, yes, from knowing Huntington's work, I am certain that it is a "perceived." Now, the term has been skipped over with the ellipses. So whether or not he has been unclear and confusing on this point is not an issue now. 172 00:43, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
You may be certain. Others are not. But at least its gone. CJK 03:29, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

(5) Re: so unless you can prove that "free trade" and "open markets" are a gigantic front to disguise American corporate imperialism, it needs to go. Drop the rhetoric and the straw men, okay? These straw men arguments accusing Huntington of making claims that he is not making here nor has never made are an example of disrupting Wikipedia to make a point.

This is what I infer when Huntington calls free trade and open markets meaningless slogans that benefit US corporate interests. CJK 21:24, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
He does not call the slogans "meaningless." A slogan is not necessarily meaningless. And by the way, the protectionist criticism of free trade is that lifting tariffs is not in the interests of American corporations, not the other way around. The anti-free trade argument that has the most currency politically in the United States is that trade liberalization hurts American manufacturers and industries (especially textiles and auto-makers). 172 00:43, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

If you are not going to engage in reasoned discussion on talk pages and citing your sources in articles, an RfC will have to be filed against your behavior. I hardly have time to do anything on Wikipedia because of your territorial revert warring on articles on your watchlist. Your uncompromising stance here has really been trying my patience lately. Now, I am going to go ahead and weed the except from the quotation where he uses the problematic term "kowtow" out of the quotation. I then hope you will respond reasonably, and agree to wrap up this tedious to the extreme discussion and archive this talk page. 172 19:48, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

I find your RFC threat utterly hollow, meaningless, and rediculous. "Territorial reverting"? You think that the only articles on my watch list are ones where I have revert wars? I have been restrained with regards to reverting this article. CJK 21:24, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
Then work toward compromise so that we can archive this talk page soon with an agreement, as opposed to me just giving up in frustration as I usually do. 172 00:43, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
You gave up only once before. I do not see a "usual" thing going on here. CJK 03:29, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
See the following. [4] Now, let's archive this talk page. I'm really tired of these unending arguments with you on U.S. history talk pages. 172 20:10, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
I too am tired of these endless arguements. But even your trimmed version is too long and is quite unequal to the other quote. I see no reason why one man's opinions should be the only major source in an encyclopedia article and eat up this much space. CJK 21:24, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
Readers can skip over a block quotation if they want. Even if they choose not to, they are still getting far less Huntington than college students taking international politics or international relations, where Huntington is often used as a core course text. 172 00:43, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
None of the average Readers will not skip over it. Sorry. CJK 03:29, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
Doesn't matter. They can make of it what they will. There's no reason to practice censorship here. 172 05:08, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Compromise 2

I think a compromise is within reach so I am narrrowing my objections to one point: Huntington's use of the word "slogan" with "free market". He is not saying that "free market" is a slogan for economic liberalization. He is not saying that "free market" is a slogan for a capitalist economy. He is saying that "free market" is a slogan for U.S. corporate interests and nothing else. Nowhere does he imply otherwise. CJK 13:47, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

I'm glad to hear that you are finally offering a compromise. But if you read the sentence logically, you will not find Huntington make these points. Given the 1990s timeframe, he is talking about specific "free market" and "free trade" programs of NAFTA and GATT. He would not state that the "free market" is just a slogan for a capitalist economy, as he has done a lot of work on and understands full well that many capitalist economies throughout the developing world decided to shift to the "free market" as they were finding that their previous strategies of state intervention and import substitution were faltering. In other words, the terms are not exactly coextensive, both as political banners and in terms of their more formal technical definitions in economics. A more effective compromise for bringing further clarity to the article instead would be placing brackets in the quotations with links to NAFTA and GATT. 172 20:09, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
That may be true, but frankly that is not present in his quote, while US corporate interests is. CJK 21:49, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
He could provide more political and historical context, but no one statement is going to say everything. As I said earlier, he's not stating anything that is inaccurate. One could take as a corollary from some of his comments that providing corporations more access to markets has something to with "free trade" policy. But he isn't explicitly or implicitly suggesting that what he is briefly mentioning concerning "free trade" is the only thing that there is to say about "free trade." I'll go ahead and insert the brackets and the hyperlinks to free trade and free markets so that readers can be directed toward the broader perspective offered in other articles. 172 23:42, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
It is still misleading to put "corporate interests" right next to "free trade". Moreover, you have labeled it an "agenda". CJK 00:42, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
"Agenda" has bad connotations? I see the word use to refer to all kinds of policy initiative (such as a "reform agenda"). I hardly follow the day-to-day political buzz on TV and radio talk shows, so I often don't know which words are dirty and which ones sound nice. In the end, a lot of the problems we discussed here boiled down to the connotations of certain words. If you don't mind me going off on a tangent, I just thought of an angle I hadn't yet considered. In politics, the dynamic of differences in the understanding of certain words and in the responses triggered by language itself is quite interesting. In the 1960s and 1970s philosophers led the way in the study of language in politics. Cultural historians soon started noticing their work. Only very recently did political scientists and historians more interested in economics and politics start to notice this work; yet this topic probably relates to what they do on a day-to-day basis. The issues that we discussed bring to our attention instances when words that academics define and use carefully in a value-neutral way often turn out to be dirty words in popular discourse. This discrepancy often goes unnoticed inside the ivory tower, probably contributing to mistrust of adademics among some quarters. For example, I noticed how the term "special interest," which used to be political science jargon used without making any sort of normative commentary on the goals of the groups described as such whatsover, all of a sudden became one of the nastier personal attacks thrown around in politics. Before "special interest" the dirty word was "iron triangle." "Iron triangle" theory became in vogue in American political science in the 1950s, but eventually lost steam some years later. Then I noticed how it got resurrected in the 1980s as a nasty political epitaph describing the Democrats in Congress. Your posts made me think about how the term "corporation" has become a dirty word on the 'anti-capitalist' far-left. Such usage of the word "corporation" as an epitaph by some elements of the left is probably the most ridiculous example I can think of; these very groups trace their roots back to V.I. Lenin, who considered the corporation the greatest organizational model ever, and eventually became obsessed with Taylorism. Still more famously, "liberal" became the worst tag one could get stuck with after the fiasco of Dukakis' presidential bid. "Bureaucracy" seems to be another one of those terms. Understood by political scientists to refer to just about any kind of large-scale modern organization, in the popular imagination the term "bureaucracy" has been associated with inefficiency, slowness, corruption, incompetence, and the like. In short, if you see me use a term that you associate with a negative connotation, the connotation probably isn't even crossing my mind. I get the impression that you think that I have been trying to criticize corporations, free trade, free markets, and the like; but that isn't at all the case. Huntington certainly was not trying to do those things; his politics tend to be relatively right-leaning even for a Harvard professor. (Contrary to Harvard's repuation in the popular imagination as a bunch of pinkos in Boston, it has often led the way in the work of conservative free market economists and hawkish foreign policy experts.) At any rate, back to the specifics of your comment, I don't understand how "agenda" sounds bad. Still, I'll go ahead and replace it with "policy initiative." Does "policy initiative" sound nicer to you? 172 04:25, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

I don't know. I read the sentence over and over again, and it sounds negative every time for reasons that I have previously explained. "Contrary to Harvard's repuation in the popular imagination as a bunch of pinkos in Boston, it has often led the way in the work of conservative free market economists and hawkish foreign policy experts." Hawkish foreign policy experts? I can't think of one war since the War of 1812 (with the exception of WWII, and only then because the US was attacked) that Boston has supported. CJK 20:43, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Try to read it denotatively. The terms that he is using are carefully defined by political scientists. Try to base your reading on those definitions of the words. Regarding Harvard, I wasn't talking about the city of Boston itself. I was talking about Harvard; and my comment was correct. As in any university, it's departments are going to be politically diverse. Richard Pipes, Henry Kissinger, Niall Ferguson, Richard Herrnstein, Martin Feldstein, William Kristol, Jeffrey Sachs (though he has been seen as moving left and becoming critical of certain policies he helped inspire) are just a few among the many Harvard professors who led the way with conservative thinking on policy. 172 22:43, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Operation Swarmer

This section has no sources, and there certainly is no indication that it was a major part of G. W. Bush's presidency. I am therefore removing it, again. Before reinserting it, please provide sources backing up its assertions and emphasizing its significance. --AaronS 21:29, 22 March 2006 (UTC) Edit: I refer you to this Time article: On Scene: How Operation Swarmer Fizzled. --AaronS 21:30, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

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