The Trend Toward Freedom
Jackson Diehl, no apologist for the Bush administration, writes in the Washington Post of the democratic changes sweeping the Middle East:
Though Iraq has now held the freest election in Arab history, conventional wisdom in Washington and the Middle East still dismisses the Bush administration’s hope that its military intervention will catalyze democratic change around the region. A recent survey by Brookings Institution scholar Shibley Telhami found that 58 percent of Arabs outside Iraq said the war had produced less rather than more democracy. In the United States, a Pew poll released last month showed that only 34 percent of Americans believed Middle East democratization would happen.
That’s one of the perverse effects of the war: Amid all the noise of suicide bombings, talk of a quagmire for U.S. troops and a sectarian conflict that could lead to Iraq’s disintegration, most people haven’t noticed that in the rest of the Arab Middle East, the political momentum of the past year has been . . . distinctly democratic.
“There’s enough going in the right direction . . . that I am one of those who believes that the intervention in Iraq will be good for democracy in the region in the middle term,” is the way Mark Malloch Brown, the witty chief of staff to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, puts it. “I’m just not sure it will be good for democracy in Iraq.”
…With the world focused on Iraq’s troubles, naysayers who insist that there has been no positive change, or even that the situation has grown worse, mostly aren’t contradicted. Yet any honest examination of the Arab world shows that the transformation Bush called for on the eve of the war in 2003 got closer in 2005.
Unfortunately, that part of the Left that calls itself ‘progressive’ refuses to engage in this honest examination. Witness this hateful slice of defeatism from the front page of Daily Kos, a piece that mocks the election while referencing a Guardian article that ultimately concludes that because of voting irregularities, the elections will take about two weeks to certify – as if the fact that irregularities are acknowledged and investigated is a BAD thing…the more exposed to ‘progressive’ thought one becomes, the more one grasps the perverse paranoia and intellectual infantilism that motivates it…
Is it really so hard to understand that until recently, when the President began speaking out in support of the war and the policy, many people don’t see what is going on? Especially given the avalanche of negative news and nearly absent reporting of the good news. Just look at how Joe Lieberman has been completely ignored, except for when Harry Reid, et al, practically accused him of being deranged (not to mention disloyal).
By the way, how long does it take to certify, via the Electoral College, the U.S. Presidential election? Congressional elections? And when was the last time we had an election that didn’t involve some measure of “irregularities”? Ah, that would be never? Yeah, never.
US 2000 was contested for 36 days…
I think the Dems are horrified about the ‘ink’ marks to prevent double voting. It would shave 1-2 million of their totals, nationally.