DEMOCRATIZATION IS THE OBSTACLE?:

The war on terror is being lost: The greatest obstacle to reducing the threat is the US administration (Richard Norton-Taylor, September 8, 2004, The Guardian)

In a telling comment last week, Mai Yamani, of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, described the annual get-together at Oxford University of the Project for Democracy Studies in Arab Countries. The participants, she wrote in the International Herald Tribune, represented the "lost resources of an Arab world that is fast becoming isolated by illiteracy, ignorance, and repression".

A new generation "denied the opportunity to participate in a range of democratic institutions or other vehicles for public self-expression, is finding more dangerous outlets for its passions". Yamani quoted a Saudi researcher at an English university as remarking: "It's easier for a young Arab to blow himself up than sweep outside his house. He doesn't feel he belongs to anything."

It is hard not to conclude that one of the greatest obstacles to the kind of better world Blair says he wants - one with less cause for terrorism, even if terrorists will always be around - is the Bush administration, and notably the likes of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

So if the problem is that they don't have participatory institutions then why is it wrong to bring them such institutions as we've done in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 8, 2004 12:00 AM