Juan Cole: Nail Driven Into Coffin of Bush's "Democratization" Program

[Hissyspit]

I read the Juan Cole column earlier, but AJ in DC at Americablog explicates well on it:

http://www.americablog.com/2007/06/killing-democracy-brand.html

Killing the democracy brand
by AJ in DC · 6/19/2007 03:58:00 PM ET

As I've noted before, the U.S. political efforts in the Middle East have all but destroyed the very idea of democracy for much of the developing world, in addition to, of course, helping nascent democracies tumble headlong into anarchy. Remember the Arab Spring? Remember how elections in Lebanon, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories were supposed to bring peace, prosperity, and ponies to the region? It turns out that democracy requires more than voting, and certainly more than voting coupled with illiberal internal policies and external meddling.

Democracy requires institutions, infrastructure, security, and other structural factors. Shamefully, the U.S. has helped undermine many of these factors in the very places we held up as examples not so long ago. The disaster in Gaza is just the latest example.

Juan Cole gets right to the point, as usual:

The events of the past few days have driven a nail into the coffin of Bush's "democratization" program for the "Greater Middle East." The Haniyah Hamas government had come to power in free and fair elections, but was immediately boycotted, starved of resources, and actually often simply kidnapped by the Israelis; and is now being put out of office in a kind of coup. The people of the Arab world are not blind or stupid. If this is what the "Greater Middle East" looks like, it will too closely resemble, for their taste, the colonial 19th century, When Europeans dictated government to Middle Easterners.

[aquart]

1. Then BushCo has succeeded. Sorta.

Vibrant democracies are a threat to any fascist enterprise. The goal was NEVER to set up democracies, but subservient colonial governments with puppet leaders who were dictatorial to their own people but slavish to us. BushCo ALWAYS says the opposite of what it means.

The misstep, of course, is that the coming dictators will be hostile to us for quite some time, with no reason at all to come to terms with us, because China, India, Russia, and Europe will be offering much better deals. Since they have the money we tossed away.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

2. lebanon.

iran, BEFORE we fucked them over.
iraq, BEFORE the brits, then we fucked them over.
Afghanistan in the 50s was becoming a vibrant society. Can't have that.
pakistan BEFORE we supported a military take over.

Come to think of it, everything we touched in that region, we have fucked up.