Sun, 29 Jan 2006

Is democracy empowering Islamists?

Has anyone else noticed the hypocrisy in all of the hand wringing and gnashing of teeth over the recent Hamas victory in Palestinian elections? By all accounts the elections were both free and fair, and the avowed goal of the Bush Administration is to spread democracy.

We've apparently achieved that goal in the territory of the Palestinian Authority. But the bad guys won! So we must cut off support immediately - never mind that the choice was between two opposing factions of suicide-bombing militants, with one being slightly more corrupt than the other.

In a democracy you always have the chance for the people to choose the "wrong" side. Do we forget that Nazis won elections in Weimar Germany? Democracy in and of itself is no panacea, especially in areas and cultures with no experience of it, and whose historical background includes no tradition of democratic action at all.

Here's a prediction: Afghanistan will do better than Iraq (or other areas of the Arab world) in this respect because at least the Afghans have the institution of the Loya Jirga, or Grand Council, which seems similar in structure to the witan that served the Anglo-Saxons kings of England and eventually evolved/morphed into Parliament. The Arab world has no such traditions. And if free and fair elections were to be held today in most Arab countries the Islamists would win handily.

The Palestinian vote was a win for democracy - but also for a radical group the US rejects.

(link) [Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories]

/Politics | 0 writebacks | permanent link


comment...

 
Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
 Name:
 URL:(optional)
 Title: (optional)
 Comments:  
Save my Name and URL/Email for next time