There are many countries around the world which frankly are run by nothing but despots who treat their people with severe brutality.

Should the West expect countries with hardly any history of democracy to adopt Western style democracies and values?

Where countries do crack down on political opposition and have very poor human rights (eg Zimbabwe, Burma, Sudan, Rwanda, DRC), should the West leave them to it, it's nawt to do with us, we're not the world police, even if they are killing thousands of people OR should we be proactive in standing up for the rights of the oppressed, get in there with military force and remove the offending Juntas\Despots?

Going in with military force has a long and glorious tradition of making things worse. At best, all we can do is give tangible support to the native opposition; at worst, in some cases we can do nothing constructive.

A case in point: Iraq. We had every justification in the world for going to war in 1991, and after we'd smashed the Iraqi army, there were several uprisings among Saddam's own population to try to get rid of him. If we'd given them tangible support (like maybe supplying some decent weapons to them) Iraq might be a much better place today. Instead we left the job half-done, and when, later, we go in deliberately to remove the government, we end up with anarchy and bloody insurrections all over the place.

Going in with military force has a long and glorious tradition of making things worse. At best, all we can do is give tangible support to the native opposition; at worst, in some cases we can do nothing constructive.

A case in point: Iraq. We had every justification in the world for going to war in 1991, and after we'd smashed the Iraqi army, there were several uprisings among Saddam's own population to try to get rid of him. If we'd given them tangible support (like maybe supplying some decent weapons to them) Iraq might be a much better place today. Instead we left the job half-done, and when, later, we go in deliberately to remove the government, we end up with anarchy and bloody insurrections all over the place.

Which can have just as bad results (bold)

Which can have just as bad results (bold)

Oh, indeed; that's why I say at best. Sometimes, even that can cause more harm than good.

Take the Janja-Weed Militia in Sudan, they'd been waging a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the native ethnic Africans for months before it hit Western headlines, thousands were wiped out, many more forced to move to refugee camps. They now have an inept African Union Force peacekeeping there.

I sometimes wonder, why not just send in 100,000 troops, get rid of the Janja-Weed, oust the Government that was instigating it. Would have possibly saved thousands of lives, but what more mess would it have created?

Take the Janja-Weed Militia in Sudan, they'd been waging a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the native ethnic Africans for months before it hit Western headlines, thousands were wiped out, many more forced to move to refugee camps. They now have an inept African Union Force peacekeeping there.

I sometimes wonder, why not just send in 100,000 troops, get rid of the Janja-Weed, oust the Government that was instigating it. Would have possibly saved thousands of lives, but what more mess would it have created?

I was actually thinking of that as an example in another thread, but i had no idea how to spell the name

I was actually thinking of that as an example in another thread, but i had no idea how to spell the name

There may not be a single universally-accepted spelling; I've usually seen it as "Janjawid." Translations from languaged that use a different alphabet to ours often can be done in half a dozen different ways, all equally valid.