HE OPENED THE GATES OF HELL AND ALL I GOT WAS LIBERTY:

Arabs Wonder at Shift Away From Autocracy (NADIA ABOU EL-MAGD, 3/17/05, Associated Press)

Just before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Arab League chief Amr Moussa warned it would "open the gates of hell." Two years later, many are asking whether the United States actually opened the doors of democracy in the Middle East.

A region dominated by autocrats is seeing Iraqi parliamentary elections, Palestinian presidential elections, and Saudi municipal elections. Anti-Syrian protests have brought down a government in Lebanon, and Egypt has announced it will hold its first multi-candidate presidential election.

The drama is being watched in Arabic-speaking households worldwide on increasingly free and borderless Arab TV stations. [...]

Bush on Wednesday said Iraqi voters who risked suicide bombings by going to the polls in parliamentary elections deserve the credit for democracy's advances in that country.

"I just don't worry about vindication or standing," Bush said, responding to a question about democratic stirrings in the Mideast. "The people who deserve the credit in Iraq are the Iraqi citizens that defied the terrorists."

Lebanon this month saw something unprecedented in Arab politics: giant demonstrations in an "independence uprising" that forced the resignation of Lebanon's pro-Syrian government.

Under pressure from the protests, the United States, the United Nations and Arab nations, Damascus has pulled back its troops in Lebanon, with the promise of removing them completely.

The example of Iraq's elections resonated in some minds. "I have denounced the American invasion of Iraq, but I also admit that the Iraqi people are now free," said opposition leader Walid Jumblatt. [...]

"There is no going back, the democratic genie is out of the box in the Arab world," said Fawaz Gerges, a Mideast expert at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y.

The "new stirrings of freedom in the Arab world" come from a convergence of internal calls for freedom with external pressures, he said. Iraq is part of it, but so is a two-decade struggle by ordinary Arabs and Muslims against their autocrats, he said.

Jordanian analyst Salameh Nimatt, in Washington, said the Iraq war "opened gates of hell on autocratic and tyrannical regimes and that should be welcomed by the people."