Interview: U.S. not entitled to spread democracy, interventionist approach troubling, says American pundit

WASHINGTON, March 30 (Xinhua) -- The United States is not entitled to spread democracy and its interventionist approach has been troubling, said an American pundit.

"The idea that we're gonna go spread democracy is just silly because we don't have democracy to spread," Daniel Kovalik, an American lawyer who teaches international human rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, told Xinhua during a recent interview.

Commenting on the 20th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Kovalik said the United States waged the Iraq War to "try to remake the Middle East."

"This was all designed to remake that part of the world in a way that would be more advantageous to the U.S.," he said. "It had nothing to do with defense or national security because Iraq represented no threat to the United States."

The Iraq War caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, extensive destruction, and political turmoil in the Western Asian country, along with an increase in sectarian politics and the rise of the Islamic State militant group in the Middle East.

The nearly nine-year military operations in Iraq also took a heavy toll on the United States, including the death of more than 4,000 American troops, huge military spending, and a greater divide in the U.S. politics and society.

Kovalik opined that the U.S. military-industrial complex, which has pushed "wars for their own profit motives," pays no attention to the consequences of wars because as long as arms manufacturers sell weapons, "they're happy with that."

"The defense industry really does drive U.S. foreign policy in a big way because they're huge donors to politicians on both sides of the aisle, to both Democrats and Republicans alike," the pundit pointed out. "So for wars to go on and on and on, that's a completely fine result."

While the U.S. defense contractors "raked in billions and billions of dollars" throughout the Iraq War, never was America's rhetoric to bring democracy and prosperity to Iraq turned into reality, as the devastated country is still struggling to find peace and recover.

The failure was almost certain because for one thing, the United States did not really care about Iraq and its people, and for the other, it is not positioned to teach others democracy as it "has its own democracy deficit," Kovalik said.

"The U.S. is not very democratic," Kovalik argued. "It is run by an oligarchy of very rich people ... Money infects politics too much. The result is that the human needs of the people are totally ignored."

"The people in America don't think that they're being represented by their government, and they're not. We spend all this money on war," the expert said.

"Meanwhile, we neglect our infrastructure and our people's health. Our banking system's falling apart," he added.

"We have the most prisoners in the world of any country in absolute numbers," the human rights and labor rights advocate noted.

"Where's the democracy? Where's the representation? I don't see it," he said.

The problem of U.S. democracy rests with "unrestricted capitalism," he said, adding the United States "is a country that is run purely for profit."

"It has a very small class of people who are very, very rich; who control civil life; who control political life; who control the economy for their benefit to the detriment of everyone else," he continued. "By definition, that cannot be democratic. It's anti-democratic."

Despite a series of domestic issues, including high inflation and the banking crisis, the United States is poised to increase its defense and military spending for the next fiscal year, which was recently budgeted at 886 billion U.S. dollars.

"We don't spend money on defense. None of this is defensive. It's all offensive. This is all for our global wars of choice," Kovalik said. "That's what makes it even more disgusting because we're spending money on offensive wars when we don't have the money to take care of our own people."

"That's the real tragedy," he said. "Again, it really shows how undemocratic it is because it is not being operated for the benefit of the vast majority of people."