THE ANTI-DEMOCRATIC DEMOCRAT:

Arabs on the Verge of Democracy (DANIELLE PLETKA, 8/09/04, NY Times)

Early last month, John Kerry devoted 11 days to fleshing out his foreign policy priorities. Promoting democracy in the Middle East, he made clear, will not be high on his agenda. Sadly, Mr. Kerry's decision could not have come at a worse moment. For the first time in half a century, democracy is the talk of the Arab world.

Mr. Kerry has not been specific about many of his goals, but one thing he's gone out of his way to advertise is his distaste for pushing reform at the expense of "stability" in the Middle East. Sure, he's in favor of democracy in principle, but not as the centerpiece of his foreign policy agenda. "Realism," in the fashion of Metternich and Kissinger, is his guiding light, Mr. Kerry told The New Yorker.

In this respect, Mr. Kerry echoes President George H. W. Bush and even his own father, Richard Kerry, a diplomat who once criticized the Reagan administration's "fatal error of seeing U.S. security as dependent on illusions of propagating democracy" in the Soviet bloc.

Such "realism," of course, was anything but. It failed to appreciate the real forces and opportunities at work in the world. The same is true today.

The stability that Realists like Senator Kerry promise would obviously freeze much of the world--especially the Arab world--in oppressive squalor. That seems unlikely to guarantee long term stability.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 9, 2004 8:33 AM