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| quote: | Originally posted by LiquidX
Well, the only answer to that is.. Iraq is not made for Democracy.. Is one of those society's that only works with strong order by a strong leader. |
I think that's a pretty shitty thing to say, but I'll also admit that I'm not the authority on the best system of government in Iraq. I do believe that every person in the world has the right to be free and to live for themselves, not to live at the mercy of an oppressive regime that deprives them of rights. In the case of Iraq, it's fair to say that most of the population doesn't even know what it means to be free, so of course it is difficult for them to comprehend it in it's early stages. Particularly since illiteracy is such a rampant problem in that region of the world.
NY Times Article
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Arabs on the Verge of Democracy
By DANIELLE PLETKA
Published: August 9, 2004
Washington — 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 initial reviews of the current President Bush's push for reform in the Middle East may have been harsh, especially from the region's entrenched powers. Yet in the last few months, the debate, once confined to émigré papers published in London or Paris, has suddenly bubbled up onto the pages of the state-controlled press in the Arab world.
And what about the argument that democracy can't be "imposed" from the outside? That counsel of despair was knocked out of the park by the Palestinian scholar Daoud Kuttab, who wrote in the London-based Arabic daily Al Hayat that "Arab democrats have failed to reach their goals through their own efforts" and should welcome support from outside "irrespective of the messenger." Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Nobel laureate, went even further in Al Ahram, Egypt's main daily newspaper, warning that postponing reform would be "playing with fire."
Mr. Kerry and his surrogates, meanwhile, worry about change that comes "too quickly" and breeds "violence and repression," in the words of an old Kerry hand from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jonathan Winer.
Arab democrats and their supporters abroad, however, might respond that the Arab world is hardly short of violence and repression as things now stand, and change that comes too slowly might prove the biggest danger. Indeed, the fruits of "stability" are hard to find in the latest Arab Human Development Report issued by the United Nations Development Program. It describes the Arab Middle East and North Africa as the least politically free region of the world. It also describes a region where 65 million adults are illiterate, almost two-thirds of them women, and where one in five citizens lives on less than $2 a day.
At the same time, Arabs are increasingly exposed to the world through the electronic media, and likely to become more angry and frustrated about their degraded status in a globalizing world economy. You don't have to strain to see such forces at play in the blind rage of Islamic radicals, or to suspect that continued "stability" of the sort that has held the region's politics and economies in stagnation for the last 40 years will only make matters worse.
In theory, the Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative rolled out by President Bush at the Group of 8 summit meeting in June is aimed at addressing the roots of terrorism in the Middle East. In fact, the initiative has amounted to little more than a tepid cheer for Arab democracy, and the Bush administration has been less aggressive in following through on its modest proposals than many hoped. If American support for democracy is going to amount to anything, there's a lot more work to be done, especially among the skeptics inside the United States Foreign Service. And if Mr. Bush can't rally his own troops to the cause, he's unlikely to continue making headway overseas.
But make no mistake, he has made headway. Notwithstanding the administration's modest approach, democracy is now at the center of debate in Arab capitals. And while some in the United States continue to insist that Arab democracy is the fantasy of a discredited cabal in Washington, an effort to avoid what they assert should be America's only priority - resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - Arab intellectuals don't necessarily agree. The director of Egypt's Al Ahram center for Political and Strategic Studies, Abdel Monem Said, took the issue on himself. "Making reform and human rights contingent upon resolving the Palestinian problem," he said, "confirms what the American neo-cons are saying, that the political regimes harming human rights are using the Palestinian problem in order to divert glances from their own behavior."
It's not 1989 in the Middle East, and a series of velvet revolutions aren't on tap for the immediate future. But the intellectual firepower that underlies any such revolution is growing; the region is in the throes of genuine pro-democratic ferment. And governments have taken note, admittedly in their own half-hearted fashion. The Arab League has embraced a series of self-serving reforms; the Saudis have announced plans for municipal elections starting in November; and the Bahrainis and Qataris are making real changes to their political systems.
Ferment is not change, but Mr. Kerry and his advisers may be kidding themselves that an incipient upheaval can be turned off just by Washington whistling another tune. More likely, without change, the United States will face one collapsing dictatorship after another and an instability much greater and more threatening than any that would come from an aggressive American push for democracy. Mr. Kerry would be wiser to try to see the world as it is - and realize that hoping the United States can impose an unchanging "stability" on the Arab world may be the greatest unrealism of all.
Danielle Pletka is vice president of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute |
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haha
