Democracy in the Middle East

The folks now running US Middle Eastern policy have for years been telling us that political stability of that region of the world can only be brought about by the installation of democratic institutions in that area of the world, followed by free elections.

That was the theory anyway.

The reality has been different. Really different.

In Iraq, we went to war to got rid of Saddam Hussain, and fostered the creation of a democratically elected government. Unfortunately Iraq is now more unstable than ever. Not only that, it would probably drift back into chaos and then into dictatorship, if the current military occupation were to end.

Worse, it now looks like the duly elected government in Iraq is going to be dominated by Shia religious clerics who are, quite openly, looking to link up with Iran. Perhaps to ally Iraq with Iran. As for Iran, the unbalanced rhetoric of its current president (who was democratically elected too) is making governments in Europe and American very nervous; especially when his rhetoric in one breath talks about the acquisition of nuclear materials and in the next breath talks about exterminating Israel.

If that ain’t enough to make you flip your lid, there’s Palestine. The recent election there have given the Hamas organization ( a radical terrorist party) a majority of the seats in the multi-party parliament. Hamas is an organization basically devoted to the destruction of Israel and the murder of Israeli citizens; although it does maintain a network of social services. E. J Dionne Jr, in the Washington Post today, thinks that the Hamas win was less a Palestinian endorsement of terror than it was a desire to get rid of the corrupt Palestinian authority. No one really knows, but it does give one pause. It certainly gives the Israelis pause.

It’s been a matter of Neocon faith (and the Neocons rule US foreign policy) that free elections are the key to Middle East stability. They’re not. At least not so far. They’re not because those elected to office are often not interested in the maintenance of democracy in any Western sense. They are more interested in the furtherance of their narrow partisan or religious views. And they do not accept the idea of the separation of church and state. Their foreign policy is basically confined to eliminating Israel as a state and getting the West out of the Middle East. If the various radical Islamic parties can do this through free elections, so much the better.

What it comes down to is this; there’ll be no enduring peace in the Middle East until the people living there accept the spirit of democracy as it is practiced in the West. They must (at a minimum)

(1) accept the idea of ordered liberty under law
(2) accept the idea of the separation of church and state and
(3) they must give up the idea of destroying Israel.

So far, they’ve shown that they will not abide by these requirements.

Punditwalla--