December 14, 2004
A RIDDLE WRAPPED IN A MYSTERY INSIDE AN ENIGMA (VIA BARRY MEISLIN)
Think Again: Middle East Democracy (Marina Ottaway and Thomas Carothers, Foreign Policy, Nov/Dec. 2004)
People in the Middle East want political freedom, and their governments acknowledge the need for reform. Yet the region appears to repel democracy. Arab regimes only concede women’s rights and elections to appease their critics at home and abroad. If democracy arrives in the Middle East, it won’t be due to the efforts of liberal activists or their Western supporters but to the very same Islamist parties that many now see as the chief obstacle to change.
Nobody ever said life was simple.
Posted by Peter Burnet at December 14, 2004 8:57 PM
If democracy ever arrives in the Middle East it will be the result of Western virtue. The inmates of that region may never thank us for shepherding them out of their long, Egyptian night, but it will be because, once again, we stood tall.
Posted by: Lou Gots at December 14, 2004 10:20 PMAnd a specific Western country's US might.
Already discounting what we've put in motion.
Posted by: Sandy P at December 15, 2004 1:18 AMThe notion that militant Islam, which is all about killing everyone and anyone who disagrees with even the merest intimation of that lunacy, will lead somehow to democracy is precisely the kind of arrant, noxious nonsense that the Foreign Policy Elite has been feeding us for decades. The view of the idiots who make up our Foreign Service seems to be to pick the people most hostile to America, its values, morals and folkways, and to present them as saviors or heroes.
Posted by: Bart at December 15, 2004 10:17 AMThe question has never been whether the Islamist parties will support an election that has a good chance of voting them into power - of course they do. They will take any way into power. The question is whether they would ever allow a subsequent election that votes them out of office.
Posted by: Chris Durnell at December 15, 2004 11:05 AM