If Bush is Serious About Arab Democracy...

Democracy requires that the results of a properly certified vote be accepted, no matter how unpalatable the outcome. So, if President Bush's promise to make democracy the guiding principle in U.S. dealings with the Middle East signals an intention to press regimes to subject themselves to the popular will, and also a readiness in Washington to respect the resulting political choices of Arab citizens, that would indeed mark a revolutionary break with the past. But the skepticism with which the President's comments were greeted among the freedom-starved peoples of the Arab world is not without foundation.

The reason every U.S. administration since FDR's has excused Arab autocracy and authoritarianism is not simply a product of what the President described as "cultural condescension" — a notion that Arab societies are unable to support democracy. No. The reason the U.S. has found itself propping up royal autocrats in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Gulf emirates and pre-revolutionary Iran, and military autocrats in Egypt, Algeria and (looking further east) Pakistan is that it prefers governments that will do Washington's bidding over the bidding of their own citizens. During the Cold War, these governments served as a bastion against leftist and nationalist currents hostile to Washington and also as guarantors of a smooth flow of oil to the West. Today, it is the war on terrorism that functions to excuse the authoritarianism of many of Washington's allies in Arab and Muslim lands.

Democracy in the Middle East and nearby Muslim lands would almost certainly restrain cooperation with the U.S. war on terror. Just look at what happened in Turkey on the eve of the Iraq war: Washington had simply assumed that Ankara would jump into line once the U.S. was on the march to war — after all, the country had been effectively ruled since World War II by generals closely aligned with Washington. But Turkey is far more democratic today, and when it was left up to the elected parliament to choose, the U.S. request to invade Iraq from Turkish territory was declined. And it's a safe bet that if Jordan and Saudi Arabia had put the matter of their own cooperation with the Iraq invasion to a freely elected legislature, the response would have been the same as Turkey's.

President Bush's handling of the Palestinians tends to feed Arab skepticism of his pronouncements on democracy. "For the Palestinian people, the only path to independence and dignity and progress is the path of democracy," said the president. "And the Palestinian leaders who block and undermine democratic reform, and feed hatred and encourage violence are not leaders at all. They're the main obstacles to peace, and to the success of the Palestinian people." In the Arab world, however, the U.S.-Israeli effort to sideline Yasser Arafat looks decidedly hypocritical — for all his warts, Arafat remains the democratically elected president of the Palestinian Authority (and as such, the only democratically elected leader in the Arab world). One reason the U.S. has steered conspicuously clear of demanding that Israel take the necessary steps to allow the Palestinians to hold new presidential elections is precisely because the smart money says Arafat would be easily reelected, despite considerable hostility among his own constituents to the corruption and ineptitude of his regime. Moreover, the suggestion that the only thing standing between the Palestinians and their freedom is Yasser Arafat is taken, in the Arab world, as an Orwellian attempt to distract attention from the reluctance of the Bush administration to restrain Ariel Sharon's creeping annexation of an ever-growing portion of the West Bank.

http://www.time.com/time/columnist/karon/article/0,9565,538464,00.html
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This is a nice piece for the most part; however, he missed the oil issue.

It is unlikely that a democratically elected leader of an oil producing country, accountable to the people, could be counted on to put US business interests above the well-being of the citizenry.

A dollaho can be.

This is why so much American blood and treasure has been spent to prevent any democracy from accidentally popping up, and not only in the Middle East.

When bush says "democracy," what he means is a restructured dollaho install, with safeguards to prevent the bitch from getting uppity like Saddam did, started wanting a bigger cut of the Kuwait revenue.

The Germans, I believe, called it "Judenrat."

money, oil n power....