Difference between revisions of "Debate:Is democracy even possible in Iraq?"

Revision as of 02:28, March 1, 2007

yes

Yes!!!

---Please explain. I'd love to know why. (This is supposed to be a debate topic and one finds it just a touch hard to debate a simple "Yes")

No

Comment

There is a phrase which has grown so common in the world's mouth that it has come to seem to have sense and meaning —the sense and meaning implied when it is used; that is the phrase which refers to this or that or the other nation as possibly being "capable of self-government"; and the implied sense of it is, that there has been a nation somewhere, some time or other which wasn't capable of it—wasn't as able to govern itself as some self-appointed specialists were or would be to govern it. The master minds of all nations, in all ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from the mass of the nation, and from the mass of the nation only—not from its privileged classes; and so, no matter what the nation's intellectual grade was; whether high or low, the bulk of its ability was in the long ranks of its nameless and its poor, and so it never saw the day that it had not the material in abundance whereby to govern itself. Which is to assert an always self-proven fact: that even the best governed and most free and most enlightened monarchy is still behind the best condition attainable by its people; and that the same is true of kindred governments of lower grades, all the way down to the lowest.

—Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

Dpbsmith 15:28, 23 January 2007 (EST)